Catalyzing Creativity With Creative Commons

Imagine the following scenario. You go to a New Years Eve celebration. Your plan is to shoot lots of great video of all the festivities, your drunken friends, and the huge fireworks display at midnight. Monday morning you'll edit the video and send a highlight mix to all your friends to commemorate the great night you had together.

Unfortunately, the battery in your camera dies the moment the fireworks display begins.

Come Monday morning when you fire up your desktop video editing software, your commemorative New Years Eve mix will be lacking fireworks -- literally. This is one example of why we started Eyespot and, more specifically, why we chose to make Eyespot a Creative Commons site. With desktop video editing software you're limited to the media on your hard drive. You have no stock footage archive to pull from. But on Eyespot, you can search the commons for fireworks and instantly access all the footage contributed by the community.

Early in 2006 a prominent member of the Creative Commons community intimated to me: "we've really opened up a can of worms". What he meant was that all the different licenses and the various restrictions associated with each had created a real challenge, i.e. how to track and enforce it all. So we decided to use technology to help alleviate some of the burden involved with the adoption of this new licensing scheme.

On Eyespot we support the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license. This essentially says that you can (for example) use the fireworks footage you find but you have to give attribution to the community members that provided the footage. To honor this requirement we built our encoding engine to automatically generate and append post-roll credits to every video created on Eyespot.

Here's a great example of the automatic attribution technology in action: this video was created by one of our users to pay tribute to the wives and girlfriends of active duty Marines. To create the video she used clips from another community member as well as a song from a popular band. The credits at the end inform us of the contributors.

This represents the transformative power of Creative Commons licensing in conjunction with innovative technology. The instantaneous and collaborative nature of the internet is fueling a rapid evolution of our relationship with media.The era of strictly passive media consumption is gone. We are now members of a culture of participation. Traditional licensing schemes worked well when the number of licensees and licensors was relatively small. But today, with an entire globe full of creators, content owners and rights lawyers are faced with A Brand New Reality.

-David