Stephen Downes

I think what Creative Commons has done over the last 25 years has been remarkable, both as an alternative approach to copyright licensing, and as an interesting exercise in viral marketing. But it's important to keep the lines of causality straight. This article suggests that Creative Commons induced millions of people (at one point it suggests billions, which is... no) to share their content. But from where I sit (and I was there back then) Creative Commons was responding to a need already present in the community where people did want to share their content, but without some content farm slurping it up and calling it theirs. There were already millions of pieces of open content online., and various licenses already existed and any of them would have done the job, but Creative Commons always approached this as a lobbying and marketing exercise, and when they teamed up with (eg.) MIT OpenCourseWare they became unstoppable (I've documented this in the past).