It’s obvious that freely sharing creativity and knowledge benefits the public. Less obvious is the fact that freely sharing also benefits the sharer – but it absolutely does.

IIlustration by @BryanMMathers, licensed CC BY

Learning Outcomes

• List some of the ways that CC licensing a work can benefit the creator

Big Question / Why It Matters

Are creators and publishers who share using Creative Commons getting anything in return?

The simple answer is yes. Of course, it’s not that using CC is a magic bullet to fame and fortune. But there are personal benefits to sharing.

Personal Reflection / Why It Matters to You

Can you think of ways that sharing your work more freely with the public might actually benefit you or your institution? Think about any time or resources you or others where you work spend on policing infringement. How else might you spend that time or invest those resources?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

In many ways, the benefits to the public from Creative Commons licensing are self-evident. They open up creative and educational content to everyone, including those who might not otherwise be able to access it. They enable people to freely share and build upon existing works, which speeds innovation and the advancement of human knowledge. They allow more people to participate in the creation and remix of our cultural outputs. They bring people together around a set of socially-minded values.

The benefits to the creator from Creative Commons licensing might be slightly less obvious. And while CC licensing is often motivated by the public benefits that flow from it, there are some personal benefits to the sharer as well.

What follows is an abridged version of many of the findings in the book, Made with Creative Commons.

Solving for Problem Zero: Getting Discovered

When you come to the internet armed with an all-rights-reserved mentality from the start, you are often restricting access to your work before there is even any demand for it. If your problem is how to get discovered, prohibiting people from copying your work and sharing it with others is counterproductive.

Of course, it’s not that being discovered by people who like your work will make you rich—far from it. But as Cory Doctorow wrote in his book, Information Doesn’t Want to be Free, “Recognition is one of many necessary preconditions for artistic success.”

Restricting access to your work may undermine your social mission. It also may alienate the people who most value your creative work. If people like your work, their natural instinct will be to share it with others. But as David Bollier wrote in Think Like a Commoner, “Our natural human impulses to imitate and share—the essence of culture—have been criminalized.”

If you take some amount of copying and sharing your work as a given, you can invest your time and resources elsewhere, rather than wasting them on playing a cat and mouse game with people who want to copy and share your work. Lizzy Jongma from the Rijksmuseum said, “We could spend a lot of money trying to protect works (from copying), but people are going to do it anyway. And they will use bad-quality versions.” Instead, they started releasing high-resolution digital copies of their collection into the public domain and making them available for free on their website. For them, sharing was a form of quality control over the copies that were inevitably being shared online. Doing this meant forgoing the revenue they previously got from selling digital images. But Lizzy says that was a small price to pay for all of the opportunities that sharing unlocked for them.

Using Creative Commons means you stop thinking about ways to artificially make your content scarce, and instead leverage it as the potentially abundant resource it is. When you see information abundance as a feature, not a bug, you start thinking about the ways to use the idling capacity of your content to your advantage.

There are all kinds of way to leverage the power of sharing and remix to your benefit. Here are a few.

Use CC to grow a larger audience

Putting a Creative Commons license on your content won’t make it automatically go viral, but eliminating legal barriers to copying the work certainly can’t hurt the chances that your work will be shared. The CC license symbolizes that sharing is welcome. It can act as a little tap on the shoulder to those who come across the work—a nudge to copy the work if they have any inkling of doing so. All things being equal, if one piece of content has a sign that says Share and the other says Don’t Share (which is what “©” means), which do you think people are more likely to share?

The idea that more eyeballs equates with more success is a form of the max strategy, adopted by Google and other technology companies. According to Google’s Eric Schmidt, the idea is simple: “Take whatever it is you are doing and do it at the max in terms of distribution. The other way of saying this is that since marginal cost of distribution is free, you might as well put things everywhere.” This strategy is what often motivates companies to make their products and services free (i.e., no cost), but the same logic applies to making content freely shareable. Because CC-licensed content is free (as in cost) and can be freely copied, CC licensing makes it even more accessible and likely to spread.

→ Creator highlight: The Conversation

Use CC to get attribution and name recognition

Every Creative Commons license requires that credit be given to the author, and that reusers supply a link back to the original source of the material. CC0, not a license but a tool used to put a work in the public domain, does not make attribution a legal requirement, but many communities still give credit as a matter of best practices and social norms.

The fact that the name of the creator follows a CC-licensed work makes the licenses an important means to develop a reputation or, in corporate speak, a brand. The drive to associate your name with your work is not just based on commercial motivations, it is fundamental to authorship. Knowledge Unlatched is a nonprofit that helps to subsidize the print production of CC-licensed academic texts by pooling contributions from libraries around the United States. The CEO, Frances Pinter, says that the Creative Commons license on the works has a huge value to authors because reputation is the most important currency for academics. Sharing with CC is a way of having the most people see and cite your work.

→ Creator highlight: TeachAIDS

Use CC-licensed content as a marketing tool

Many endeavors that use Creative Commons make money by providing a product or service other than the CC-licensed work. Sometimes that other product or service is completely unrelated to the CC content. Other times it’s a physical copy or live performance of the CC content. In all cases, the CC content can attract people to that other product or service.

Knowledge Unlatched’s Pinter told us she has seen time and again how offering CC-licensed content—that is, digitally for free—actually increases sales of the printed goods because it functions as a marketing tool. We see this phenomenon regularly with famous artwork. The Mona Lisa is likely the most recognizable painting on the planet. Its ubiquity has the effect of catalyzing interest in seeing the painting in person, and in owning physical goods with the image. Abundant copies of the content often entice more demand, not blunt it. Another example came with the advent of the radio. Although the music industry did not see it coming (and fought it!), free music on the radio functioned as advertising for the paid version people bought in music stores. Free can be a form of promotion.

→ Creator highlight: Cory Doctorow

Use CC to enable hands-on engagement with your work

The great promise of Creative Commons licensing is that it signifies an embrace of remix culture. Indeed, this is the great promise of digital technology. The Internet opened up a whole new world of possibilities for public participation in creative work.

Four of the six CC licenses enable reusers to take apart, build upon, or otherwise adapt the work. Depending on the context, adaptation can mean wildly different things—translating, updating, localizing, improving, transforming. It enables a work to be customized for particular needs, uses, people, and communities, which is another distinct value to offer the public. Adaptation is critical in some contexts. With educational materials, for example, the ability to customize and update the content is critically important for its usefulness.

Actively engaging with the content helps us avoid the type of aimless consumption that anyone who has absentmindedly scrolled through their social-media feeds for an hour knows all too well. In his book, Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky says, “To participate is to act as if your presence matters, as if, when you see something or hear something, your response is part of the event.” Opening the door to your content can get people more deeply tied to your work.

→ Creator highlight: Arduino

Use CC to differentiate yourself

Operating under a traditional copyright regime usually means operating under the rules of establishment players in the media. Business strategies that are embedded in the traditional copyright system, like using digital rights management (DRM) and signing exclusivity contracts, can tie the hands of creators, often at the expense of the creator’s best interest. Using Creative Commons means you can function without those barriers and, in many cases, use the increased openness as a competitive advantage.

→ Creator highlight: PLoS

Final remarks

The internet and digital technology have created a vastly different world for creators and publishers. That new world calls for new strategies. Rather than reflexively defaulting to a focus on restricting access, it is worth thinking about the benefits of open.