creative commons through the looking glass

Lessig's use of Flickr photos: is Creative Commons really a community?

A somewhat throw-away comment on Lawrence Lessig blog yesterday made me start to wonder if Creative Commons is really a community. Not in a negative way. Read on and you'll get what I mean.

Lessig was commenting on Pomona College Associate Professor of English and Media Studies Kathleen Fitzpatrick's positive review of his new book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy on the Barnes & Noble site, and how that had made his day a lot better than Spencer E Ante's scathing and uninteresting review on the BusinessWeek site had.


International for the launch of Creative Commons Hong Kong he recounted how he had added a Flickr image of the book's cover to the entry about Ante's review to "distract from the Spencer review." He went on to say:

I didn't know the photographer, and certainly didn't know where she was from. I'm not even quite sure how I even came across the image. But after my talk here in Hong Kong, she came up to me. She had seen the image on my blog.

He called this the "most amazing fact of the day" and it is!

Relationships are developed through social interactions. Such interactions include some form of exchange whether this takes the form of time spent together, exchanging actual goods (such as the proverbial cup of sugar borrowed), exchanging information, etc. [2]

For Creative Commons, the licensing and marking of content as having "some rights reserved" is the mechanism through which sharing takes place. But unlike real-world communities, "...where the “coin of the realm” for relationship building often includes the ritual sharing or exchange of [physical]“things”" [3], "things" within the Creative Commons community are not as directly shared. For example, if I ask my neighbour for the proverbial cup of sugar (and they agree to 'share' their sugar supply with me) I am given directly, by them, a cup of sugar. Compare this to the experience of sharing using Creative Commons. I make my photos available on Flickr under an Attribution licence. Rather than my neighbour coming over to my place to request my images, I have preempted the request (some might argue prematurely and superficially since I do not know if anyone actually wants them) and already granted my neighbour and everyone else permission. Often the experience of sharing using CC doesn't involve any direct interaction between the parties sharing.

This is compounded further by the fact that Creative Commons, unlike other communities online, lacks direct membership (although the ccNetwork may change that over time). Unlike social networks which, like geographic communities, have a boundary (ie you must log in to be part of the community), Creative Commons is not restricted to any one platform, nor for that matter to just the virtual environment. For the real-world and virtual 'gated communities' "some people belong, others do not," as University of North Carolina at Greensboro academics Julia Hersberge, Kevin Rioux and Ray Cruitt note. "Isolation and rejection can be the negative outcome of boundary setting."

I know that one of the philosophical underpinnings of Creative Commons and other Open Content Licensing models is to not discriminate, which is why they are available to anyone. But for members of the Creative Commons community the real possibility of feeling alone and isolated within the community can be strong. With no central 'community hub' and a very dispersed community it can be difficult to be recognised as being part of the community at all.

To me, it is because of this that Creative Commons has such a vibrant set of subcommunities; CC users on Flickr, Deviant Art, ccMixter, educators in support of Open Educational Resources, meet up (at official CC events, events run by other organisations and unofficially) and a number of others. To me, the fact that through Creative Commons Lessig and laihiu were not just able to share content with each other, but that indirectly that formed into a direct relational bond to one another. Without CC it is unlikely they would have (Lessig probably would not have been in Hong Kong, laihiu probably would not have known who Lessig was to see him speak even if he were in Hong Kong) even though they presumably the share some common interests. An aspect of Creative Commons which is increasingly interesting to me is the way in which relationships are fostered through it and by it. Does anyone have an annecdote similar to this? Has anyone made any lasting relationships through their decision to share using Creative Commons?