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Announcing the Commonwealth

Matt Haughey, Creative Commons, Aug 18, 2004
Commentary by Stephen Downes

In various fora I have warned of the danger that Creative Commons will commercialize. It would be too great a temptation, I argued, to create special 'business' Creative Commons licenses for commercial content, possibly charging a fee for managing the license. When the Creation Commons 'Education' licenses were proposed a few months ago, I warned that this was first step in the process (here, here, here, and here). That day has now come. The commercialization of Creative Commons has taken a large step forward with the development of what is being called the 'Commonwealth'.

From one of the web sites: "The goal of this discussion list is to develop a new form of hybrid commercial / non-commercial license for various kinds of intellectual property with particular emphasis on software. We hope to combine the best of open source and proprietary models. In so doing, we'll explore questions like: Can we create the greatest social welfare and the greatest innovation? Can we simultaneously benefit businesses, developers, and end users over the long run? Can we build models of the process of software growth and diffusion?"CRLF

Now on the one hand I have long argued that there should be a common marketplace for commercial and non-commercial content - that is, indeed, at the heart of my digital rights management proposal. But Creative Commons was built upon a different premise: that it is the home for free online content - it is for that reason that it enjoyed such widespread support. That is why I opposed CC Education. I always wondered why Creative Commons never had anything like a voting process, why its decisions were made centrally, why it was run more like a business than a part of the open source community. With the arrival of Creative Commons Inc. (aka the Commonwealth) I think we know.

CRLFSometimes, I get tired of saying "I told you so..."

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