Innovation in Open Networks - Creative Commons, the Next Layer of Openness

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Joichi Ito <joi () ito com>
Date: October 30, 2009 1:46:08 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Innovation in Open Networks - Creative Commons, the Next  
Layer of Openness

Original Tweet: My blog post: http://bit.ly/3HW8qN and @McKQuarterly  
version: http://bit.ly/4x2aNN of article on how @creativecommons is  
new stack layer

Original Blog Post:

Innovation in Open Networks - Creative Commons, the Next Layer of  
Openness
A few months ago, McKinsey & Co. asked me to write an article for  
their online magazine What Matters. The edited article, "Creative  
Commons: Enabling the next level of innovation" was just posted to  
their site.

Following is the unedited original version.

--

The explosion of innovation around the Internet is driven by an  
ecosystem of people who work in an open network defined by open  
standards. However, the technical ability to connect in an  
increasingly seamless way has begun to highlight friction and failure  
in the system caused by the complicated copyright system that was  
originally designed to "protect" innovation. Just as open network  
protocols created an interoperable and frictionless network, open  
metadata and legal standards can solve many of the issues caused by  
copyright and dramatically reduce the friction and cost that it  
currently represents.

Before Ethernet and RJ45 connectors became the standard, we connected  
computers together using a variety of different network technologies  
and connectors. It was usually physically impossible to connect  
computers from different companies together. Many of us will remember  
having Appletalk cables on our Macintoshes, which didn't connect to  
the network cables on our PCs. While Ethernet wasn't the "smartest"  
protocol around, because of its simplicity and the lack of proprietary  
patents encumbering its use, it became widely adopted as a standard  
way to connect computers together.

Before TCP/IP was developed, even if the computers were able to be  
connected together physically and electronically, the computers  
couldn't really talk to each other without proprietary networking  
software. There were the networking protocols from computer and  
operating system vendors like Appletalk and Microsoft's own networking  
protocol. You could also buy networking equipment and software from  
vendors such as Banyan and Novell.

I remember very clearly when I first heard about TCP/IP and I  
downloaded the free implementations for both my Mac and my PC and for  
the first time, was able to communicate between the computers and more  
importantly with all of the computers in the rest of the world using  
TCP/IP. TCP/IP enabled the creation of the Internet and ended an era  
of proprietary networks both locally and as services such as The  
Source, CompuServe and AOL in their original forms.

Then Tim Berners Lee and the World Wide Web came along. Again, I  
remember clearly many people arguing that we didn't need the World  
Wide Web since we could already log into any computer on the Internet,  
download papers, find the citations and track down and easily download  
the references. Many people did not recognize, initially, the value  
that the interoperability and the simplicity that the World Wide Web  
enabled in creating documents on the Internet.

As we know in hindsight, each of these open standards created an  
explosion of innovation. Ethernet enabled companies such as Cisco,  
3Com and others to emerge and compete in an area that used to be  
dominated by huge vendors who built super-expensive networking systems  
designed by telephone companies to specifications hammered out over  
years in Inter-Governmental standards bodies.

Similarly, TCP/IP allowed independent companies, the first ISPs to  
compete at providing network services to companies and individuals,  
breaking, often for the first time, monopolies that the telephone  
companies were granted by government. This introduced competition  
driving down the cost of moving bits around and also enabled a whole  
ecosystem of software components, many free and open source. Author  
David Weinberger would later describe this system as "small pieces  
loosely joined." This new network created out of small objects  
developed by small teams using open standards and protocols was a  
completely new model.

In the past, organizations under the UN such as CCITT that later  
became the ITU worked together with governments, telephone companies  
and their huge research organizations to create enormously complicated  
standards anticipating every possible problem and building in features  
for the various constituents represented at in the meetings. After  
years of deliberation, these standards would be agreed upon and the  
telephone companies would contract massive projects taking years and  
millions of dollars to huge vendors who would develop the systems.  
There was no room for small pieces, small players or participation by  
any person or organization that wasn't well trained, organized, funded  
and authorized.

The Internet changed all of that. The Internet Engineering Task Force  
(IETF) had the credo, "rough consensus, running code". Anyone could  
participate in the discussion and in fact, much of the discussion  
occurred online allowing just about anyone to contribute as long as  
what they were saying or the code they were writing made sense. The  
agile method of developing standards allowed very small teams and  
individuals to participate both in the standards process and the  
development of useful tools and components of the network.

It took only several years from the days when "unauthorized devices"  
couldn't be connected to the Internet to when just about everything  
important that we were using to talk to each other was written by  
small teams on top of lightweight standards and protocols, mainly HTML  
and HTTP, on top of TCP/IP.

The Web and the ability for users to "view source" and copy each  
other's code created an explosion of innovation, content and business  
models such as eBay, Amazon and Wikipedia.

If you try to imagine what it would have been like to create Google  
before we had this stack of open standards, you would probably have  
had to pay IBM millions of dollars to create the software on a  
proprietary operating system. It would have required a huge team of  
people taking many years. Since it was a "search engine" it most  
likely would have been given to the phone company to design and run.  
If we were using X.25, the CCITT equivalent of the Internet, we would  
be charged and would be charging each person for each packet of  
information that they sent and received from us in a network where  
each network operator had a bilateral agreement with each other  
network operator.

This total project probably would have taken a decade and cost a  
billion dollars and would probably not even have worked properly.

In fact, the total cost of actually building and launching the first  
Google server was probably only thousands of dollars using standard PC  
components, mostly open source software as the base and connecting to  
the Stanford University network which immediately made the service  
available, at no additional cost, to everyone else on the Internet.

The open standards and the small pieces loosely joined had created an  
ecosystem of components and networks that dramatically lowered the  
cost of development, collaboration and delivery. This allowed people  
to innovate, launch, fail, connect, mashup and remix in such an  
efficient way and at such low cost, that the center of innovation  
moved from the research laboratories of the giant companies to the  
startup and venture capital scene in Silicon Valley.

Of course, there were startups and venture capitalists before the  
Internet, but the influence and scale of this new engine of innovation  
was unprecedented.

The Internet continues to disintermediate and disrupt sector after  
sector by lowering friction and enabling interoperability. We find  
businesses and whole industries having to change their models and  
compete with a whole new set of players ranging from individuals to  
companies to non-profit organizations. In most cases, this has created  
lower prices, more access and more choice for the users. The new  
industries outscale in size and global reach businesses of the past.

The Internet has enabled us to technically connect and collaborate.  
But just as network software engineers were required to open  
communications between online users, we now need lawyers to sort out  
the copyright and content regulations between us so that we -  
businesses and individuals - can share, collaborate and build legally.

Before the Internet, if two large companies wanted to collaborate on a  
project or one company wanted to license a work from another company  
for their territory, the deal makers would often meet in a posh hotel  
in Cannes sipping champagne to negotiate a price. After several rounds  
of golf and a few cigars, the executives would agree on the price and  
"my people will talk to your people" to nail down the details.  
Finally, the lawyers would be flown in to negotiate the contract.  
Often these deals were multi-million dollar deals, legal fees costing  
hundreds of thousands of dollars over the lifetime of the  
collaboration. However, the value and the cost of the actual  
transaction was so high that the legal fees were just absorbed into  
the cost.

Today, the Internet enables a professor in Croatia to collaborate on  
courseware with a professor in Japan. However, if they are going to  
legally share data and copyrighted material, they need to clear the  
licensing systems of both universities, calling upon their mutual  
legal departments. Most likely, they would need to bring in outside  
experts to translate the legal documents and finally they would  
negotiate some sort of contract for the collaboration. The legal fees  
between these two professors would drastically exceed the technical  
cost and probably the value of the project, effectively making such a  
transaction prohibitively expensive, dooming this collaboration to  
failure.

Imagine an amateur filmmaker creating content to upload to their  
website as they try to clear the rights of music that they've gathered  
from across the Internet. Or imagine someone who wants to give a  
television broadcaster the right to use, with attribution, a  
photograph that they had posted on their blog. In most cases, the  
legal fees would exceed the value of the transaction and the sharing  
would fail, either because the parties would ignore the law, or opt  
not to share because the legal cost of doing so was prohibitive.

Creative Commons, the non-profit organization for which I am the Chief  
Executive Officer, is the "TCP/IP of collaboration and content layer."  
Creative Commons aims to solve these problems with a series of  
licenses, technical specifications and tools that allow creators to  
mark their works with the permissions that they wish to grant, free of  
charge. People using Creative Commons licenses decide whether they  
would like to allow commercial reuse or restrict reuse to only non- 
commercial purposes. They decide whether they would like to allow  
derivative use and modification of their creation. And they decide  
whether these modified works must be shared back to the rest of the  
world using the same free license or not.

Creative Commons also provides tools for users to dedicate their works  
to the public domain. For some scientific data or educational  
resources the public domain provides the maximum flexibility and value.

You can choose one of the Creative Commons licenses yourself or use  
the CC0 public domain dedication tool. Service providers like Google,  
Yahoo and Microsoft support Creative Commons, providing tools to  
technically mark your works with easily understood icons and  
standardized metadata. Standardized metadata means other users can  
easily find and use available creative works, making tasks such as  
attribution and citation easy and automatic.

Users of Creative Commons licenses such as The White House, MIT,  
Wikipedia, Flickr, Al-Jazeera and many others have generated over 250  
million works published under Creative Commons licenses and do not  
need to hire a lawyer each time they want to share because each of  
these works uses a standard license. People building on these works  
also do not need to ask permission each time they want to share and  
collaborate because the necessary permissions have already been granted.

This lowering of friction and ability to interoperate creates an  
opportunity for completely new types of collaborations as well as the  
ability for previously excluded sectors of society to participate.

Projects such as Open CourseWare and the open educational resources  
(OER) movement allow students and educators to share and build upon  
each others works dramatically increasing transparency and diversity  
while decreasing the overall cost of collaboration and delivery for  
online learning.

Scientists and researchers all over the world are increasingly sharing  
data outside of the traditional academic and corporate silos enabling  
more participants and collaboration at an unprecedented scale.

Previously, because of the technical difficulties and costs, many of  
these barriers were not visible and in many cases were necessary in  
order to build business models to allow the high cost sharing that was  
necessary before the Internet.

Now, many of the systems put in place to protect businesses sharing  
information are becoming barriers to more widespread sharing as the  
Internet technically enables a whole new layer of collaboration and  
innovation. Even copyright itself can be a barrier to collaboration.

TCP/IP and the Web are successful because they are open standards  
shepherded by non-profit organizations which are custodians of a  
bottom-up process taking inputs from and creating consensus from a  
wide variety of stakeholders. Similarly, Creative Commons is a non- 
profit organization with thousands of volunteers in over 80 countries  
working to develop standards for content sharing and to help  
organizations adopt these standards.

Having 100 Internets or 100 World Wide Webs governed by incompatible  
"standards" would suffocate the network effects that we enjoy on our  
one interoperable Web. Having a single set of copyright licenses and a  
single metadata format is key to creating the network effect of  
interoperability at the collaboration/legal layer.

Just as some networks still use X.25 and some electronic publishing  
systems do not use the Web and HTML, there will always be some cases  
where the standardized licenses that Creative Commons provides do not  
make sense. However, Creative Commons has become the defacto standard  
for the Internet and the ecosystem of sharing and is best viewed as  
much a standards organization as anything else.

In the early days, those of us who were proponents of TCP/IP had to  
argue with regulators, lawyers and technologists who for a variety of  
reasons did not support TCP/IP. Creative Commons still has critics who  
have not yet understood and do not feel the benefit of the network  
effects and collaboration that Creative Commons enables.

Just as we have seen with each new layer of the Internet stack, I  
believe that Creative Commons will soon become, in hindsight, an  
obvious thing and that all of the yet to be imagined innovations will  
have a dramatically positive effect on business, society and the  
environment.





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