Several AboutUs-ers had the pleasure of attending BarCamp Portland 3 on Friday and Saturday, and among the multitude of fascinating conversations we got to participate in, one in particular stood out in regards to AboutUs.
The ever-brilliant Aaron Hockley convened a session on “Creative Commons – What works, what could change.” (Sparse notes here.) Aaron had an interesting story to tell: a freelance photographer, back in September of 2008 he chose to license his work under Creative Commons. Now, normally that would be the end of the story, and as a CC-licensed business ourselves, we’d be happy to welcome Aaron in to the fold (so to speak).
But Aaron found the time he had to spend policing his content and educating others about the nature of Creative Commons to be interfering with his best intentions towards allowing the attributed, non-commercial use of his photos (read his full post). That’s a serious potential problem, if one slightly specific to those with a financial investment in the work they have licensed.
I sympathize with Aaron’s situation, and it brings up very interesting questions about what Creative Commons needs to work on in their licensing. It could be particularly worrying that one photographer found it prohibitively time consuming to see that people respected his licensing choices. With more than 14 millions pages, it’s probably impossible for us to keep tabs on anything except a substantial abuse of the free license. However, we chose to use Creative Commons not only to allow sharing of our work on principle.
The free licensing of our site is a social contract with those who contribute to it.
On the one hand, they know that their hard work won’t disappear and is not bound to the future of the company. On the other, they are comfortable sharing their work because we do not claim an iron-clad ownership of it. Both these facets allow individuals and businesses of all sorts to work on AboutUs, and for a unique relationship between a company and a community to exist.