Creative Commons has been a frequent subject of discussion here on Worldchanging, and with good reason: the Creative Commons license has changed the world's understanding of intellectual property -- and helped us see that getting intellectual property rules right can spur innovation.
Nowhere is innovation more badly needed, of course, than in the developing world, where environmental and social problems are magnified not only by economic poverty itself, but by the lack of access to information which could alleviate those problems.
Very often solutions to those problems already exist, or at least designs for parts of those solutions. These solutions and ideas provide puzzle pieces from which people can assemble their own better futures, as it were. But when people don't know those pieces exist, and when they have to access to use of those solutions, those solutions might as well not exist. This is why the copyfight is such a worldchanging concern.
The Developing Nations license is meant to open the floodgates of access to new solutions in the Global South by creating a system which encourages designers and creators in the Global North to freely share their innovations. As we put it in the book, " This new license allows creators to make their works available for attributed free distribution (copies can be freely shared, providing the original creator is credited) in the Global South, while still retaining all copyright control in the Global North."
Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig very kindly agreed to take some time to share some thoughts about the progress of the Developing Nations license. I reached him at his new home in Berlin.
"It's been most successful in areas we didn't expect," Lessig explains. "We planned originally to have it be a spur to publishing, bringing intellectual resources to developing nations that lack them. Architecture for Humanity was not the prime target for this when we first launched, and yet that's been its most interesting use."
(Architecture for Humanity is using the Developing Nations license to build a framework for open source design collaboration for meeting humanitarian crises with the best available tools.)
"This is all about eliminating artificial barriers to the spread of knowledge," he continues. "Digitial technoilogy has inspired an explosion of creators. We want to give people the abiolity to share and modify their works in the way which satisfies their own desires, not the copyright law."
The goal, Lessig says, is to make resources that are not intended for the developing world available to people in the developing world by changing the licenses to allow use where there is no financial incentive. In other words, if you've created something of use to other people who will probably never be able to pay you in any meaningful way for your work, but whose use of your creation also won't cost you any money, why not let them use it? This would seem to be a no-brainer, but it's "not something people have spent much time on, because there's not a lot of money to be made."
The point is not charity "We're not trying to ask creators to become philanthropists, we're simply identifying ways in which the system just isn't serving anyone s interests. It's not as if most designers expect to make any profit in the developing world anyway, and the ability to share those designs could help some people without hurting the designer at all." The point, Lessig says, is the thrill creative people in the Global North can get from knowing that their thinking is not only earning them a living at home but helping address major (and interesting) new challenges elsewhere. "The license has allowed amazing creators to, as they say iin the Open Source community, scratch an itch -- they allow, for example, architects to address certain design challenges in their own work while making that work available to a whole part of the world that needs it to solve other challenges."
And the potential here has just begun to manifest itself.
"What we're really eager to do is see if there is a way to generalize this and see if there are more people making designs who are willing to share them in this way. We're trying to hack the copyright system, in the programmers sense of hack. Not to break it but make it function in ways it wasn't intended to work. That's not because we're opposed to copyright, but because we're opposed to copyright functioning in ways that don't benefit either the author or the end user. Copyright is meant to be a tool to promote invention."
