Benlog

I attended Creative Commons’s iCommons summit today (photographic proof). As I watched the presentations, looked around at the more than 80 representatives from the 70 countries that are now taking part in Creative Commons, I realized a simple fact that has snuck up on me: Creative Commons is kicking some serious butt.

There are now 15,000,000 documents distributed under a CC license, which is almost 0.2% of the Google index. The number of CC-licensed documents is currently growing at an 80% quarterly rate. As Neeru said when she showed the pie graph: the amazing thing is that you can see the Creative Commons share on a web-wide pie graph.

What’s most amazing to me is the rapid success of CC’s international expansion. While the US effort had the novelty of the movement and the blog early-adopter phenomenon to jumpstart it, a lot of these international efforts are making significant headway with far fewer resources, far less press, far more complicated copyright issues (moral rights anyone?), and far less low-hanging fruit.

This is now a real, world-wide movement, the likes of which I have never experienced. A movement of people who believe that there should be some kind of middle-ground between extreme DRM control and total public domain. A movement of people who want to create a new ecosystem of sharing, because they know deep in their hearts that sharing (some) culture and science freely is the most important trend we have to reassert as a generation.

I could not be more proud of the fact that I play a tiny role in this huge effort.