Great things: Creative Commons

We already know that our users are keen on supporting great things, and Creative Commons definitely belongs to that category. The way they support digital creativity, sharing and innovation is truly fantastic. And there’s a huge demand among our Flattr-users to be enabled to support this kind of work, one way or another.

To be able to support the Creative Commons as an organization, and not just the products licensed under a CC-license is a fantastic opportunity for us, all the users of Flattr, to show that we really appreciate the work they do in this era of fights over Intellectual Property rights.

Creative Commons is about to turn 10 years, in mid-December it’s party time! Over these 10 years they’ve reached quite a few milestones. To list a few examples:
— Wikipedia adopted the CC-license CC Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) which means that you’re allowed to share and remix the material as long as you don’t change the licensing and attribute Wikipedia. They applied this to over 17 million articles in more than 270 languages. Read more
— Did you know that you can CC-BY license your YouTube videos? Read more
— Just as you can add it to your Flickr photos as well to allow others to use and remix. Read more here and how we use it here.

[embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKQmj56MLVg[/embed]
You can read about their 9 year celebration and view the above video in full quality here.

10 years is a long time, but even the big shots had to start somewhere!
Creative Commons started as a grassroots movement which soon gained a lot of support from creators all over, especially within the arts and culture.
They’ve had ten years to develop the licenses and tools so that they work not only in culture, but across many domains, like the arts, education, science, and government, which arguably constitute or contribute to overall culture. Today the licences and tools are legally robust and viable around the world.

I got in contact with Creative Commons in the process of them getting a shiny Non-Profit account on Flattr, and I took the opportunity to ask a few questions:

What made you decide to start using Flattr for Creative Commons?
— Somewhat by accident! We were always aware of it, but until a mysterious entity registered an account for us, we didn’t actively start to use it. But we’re happy we did as we think it’s another great avenue of connecting with various communities. We also have a curated CC page on Kickstarter; basically, we like to support other initiatives where it makes sense for both of us. Flattr is one of these.

The mission of Creative Commons is to develop, support, and steward legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation. Do you believe that Flattr can pay an important role in this development?
— I think Flattr could help us educate various communities about what we do. Flattr itself is about helping those who are helping others — we are helping others by building and maintaining the infrastructure on which the open web is built. Anything to assist in that, whether it’s getting the word out, helping us with funds, or helping to strengthen connections between us and various stakeholders, is important.

Now we can look forward to then launching their next annual campaign where Flattr will be an option for donation, but why wait till then? Go to their profile now and Flattr them!
You can find out any information about them on their website, which also doubles as a search engine for CC-licenced material all over the web.