A big welcome, then, to a new book Made with Creative Commons, by Paul Stacey and Sarah Hinchliff Pearson. The book – subtitled “A guide to sharing your knowledge and creativity with the world, and sustaining your operation while you do” – explains the licenses to a new generation of users. It also offers two dozen case studies about the legal sharing of textbooks, music, data, art and other works, thanks to CC licenses.

CC licenses are widely used elements of many popular platforms these days, including Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, the video sites YouTube and Vimeo, the scientific journals published by the Public Library of Science, MIT’s OpenCourseware, and Europeana, among many others.

For newcomers to Creative Commons licenses:  They are standard public licenses that a copyright holder can use to alert people that their works can be copied, re-used, and modified (depending upon the license) without permission or payment.  They are free to use and easily used.  Since the suite of licenses was released in 2003, it has been adapted to the legal systems of more than 170 countries in the world.  An estimated 1 billion works have been tagged with CC licenses, as of 2015.

Made with Creative Commons chronicles the benefits of using the licenses and illustrates those points with profiles of an individual musician (Amanda Palmer), a university textbook publisher (Knowledge Unlatched), an electronics manufacturer (Arduino), and a global community of furniture designers (Open Desk), among many others.

As Stacey and Pearson explain, the licenses speed the dissemination of creative works and information because they ensure access to everyone.  They maximize participation and collaboration in creating new works.  They spur innovation because more people can build on existing ideas with new twists.  CC licenses also boost the reach and impact of works because there are no artificial market or distribution constraints.

Because each re-use of a work adds value to the shared pool of knowledge and creativity, CC licenses are generative to our culture, not extractive, as conventional copyright tends to be.  Finally, there is a social solidarity that the licenses tend to encourage by enabling groups of people to create and manage their own knowledge commons.

Made with Creative Commons discusses how using the licenses can help a creative newcomer get discovered. “You can stop thinking about ways to artificially make your content scarce, and instead leverage it as the potentially abundant resource that it is,” write Stacey and Pearson.  Thus the makers of Arduino printed-circuit boards make their designs openly available under a CC license, enabling Arduino to build a different sort of revenue model around an open community of tinkerers and innovators.  The science-fiction writer Cory Doctorow has used CC licenses on his commercially successful books for years.  It has helped him attract a wider audience while also boosting sales for the physical copies of his books.

Creative Commons, the organization, has come a long way since its founding, and this book reflects some new thinking.  For example, the book situates the commons within the larger spheres of the market and state, contrasting the different logic and roles played by each.  The beginnings of a critical analysis of the political economy are evident.

When first introduced, the CC licenses focused on the emancipation that come with openness, which was indeed a significant advance over the closed, proprietary publishing world of the 20th century. But as open networks have become dominated by Google, Facebook, Amazon and other digital giants, the upside of openness per se has diminished – and the appeal of self-managed commons has grown.

That’s because big tech companies often make significant profits by becoming default platforms for user-generated content and social sharing.  They in effect monetize social sharing without rewarding the communities or original authors.  They make social collaboration a vulnerable resource that the biggest market players see as “free for the taking.” Made with Creative Commons implicitly acknowledges the limitations of openness, suggesting that perhaps the organization is ready to move beyond some of its libertarian, Silicon Valley roots.

Made with Creative Commons is published under a CC Attribution-ShareAlike license, and available in many formats, including a printed book.

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Sarah Pearson: About 1.5 years ago, after a successful Kickstarter campaign, we set out to research and write a book about the ways creators and businesses make money when they share their work using Creative Commons licensing. We had a particular vision for the work. We would identify and interview 24 diverse enterprises. We would analyze their revenue models and customer segments. We would figure out what makes them work and turn it into advice that applies to everyone.

But like many of the best laid plans, things changed along the way. It wasn’t that we were wrong to think you could make money using CC. Many of the people we interviewed talked about the ways CC licensing helped them reach more people and accordingly, make more money. Nor were we wrong that we would find business models involving CC that others could replicate.

The biggest pivot in our work was that the business model framework just wasn’t big enough to capture the full picture. According to the “Business Model Generation” handbook, a business model “describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value.” Thinking about sharing in terms of creating and capturing value always felt inappropriately transactional and out of place, something we heard time and time again in our interviews. And as Cory Doctorow told us in our interview with him, “Business model can mean anything you want it to mean.”

Eventually, we got it. Being “Made with Creative Commons” is more than a business model. While our book talks about specific revenue models as one piece of our analysis, we scrapped that as our guiding rubric for the book. By the end of the process, the book became much more than a business book. It is about what gives sharing — and Creative Commons — its real meaning.

Here is an excerpt from the book, “Made with Creative Commons” .

Regardless of how they made money, in our interviews, we repeatedly heard language like “persuading people to buy” and “inviting people to pay.” We heard it even in connection with revenue streams that sit squarely within the market. Cory Doctorow told us, “I have to convince my readers that the right thing to do is to pay me.” The founders of the for-profit company Lumen Learning showed us the letter they send to those who opt not to pay for the services they provide in connection with their CC-licensed educational content. It isn’t a cease-and-desist letter; it’s an invitation to pay because it’s the right thing to do. This sort of behavior toward what could be considered non-paying customers is largely unheard of in the traditional marketplace. But it seems to be part of the fabric of being Made with Creative Commons.

Nearly every endeavor we profiled relied, at least in part, on people being invested in what they do. The closer the Creative Commons content is to being “the product,” the more pronounced this dynamic has to be. Rather than simply selling a product or service, they are making ideological, personal, and creative connections with the people who value what they do.

It took me a very long time to see how this avoidance of thinking about what they do in pure market terms was deeply tied to being Made with Creative Commons. I came to the research with preconceived notions about what Creative Commons is and what it means to be Made with Creative Commons. It turned out I was wrong on so many counts.

Obviously, being Made with Creative Commons means using Creative Commons licenses. That much I knew. But in our interviews, people spoke of so much more than copyright permissions when they explained how sharing fit into what they do. I was thinking about sharing too narrowly, and as a result, I was missing vast swaths of the meaning packed within Creative Commons. Rather than parsing the specific and narrow role of the copyright license in the equation, it is important not to disaggregate the rest of what comes with sharing. You have to widen the lens.

Being Made with Creative Commons is not just about the simple act of licensing a copyrighted work under a set of standardized terms, but also about community, social good, contributing ideas, expressing a value system, working together. These components of sharing are hard to cultivate if you think about what you do in purely market terms. Decent social behavior isn’t as intuitive when we are doing something that involves monetary exchange. It takes a conscious effort to foster the context for real sharing, based not strictly on impersonal market exchange, but on connections with the people with whom you share—connections with you, with your work, with your values, with each other.

This piece was written by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson, senior counsel at Creative Commons. She is the co-author of “Made with Creative Commons.”

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