My connection with Creative Commons started before music entered the picture. My cofounder Sandra Brandenburg and I were writing business books and publishing them using Creative Commons licenses. Through that work we became familiar with the idea that creators could share their work under clear conditions while still retaining rights.

Around 2005 we began producing video projects. That confronted us with a practical problem: finding music we could license in a flexible way. Traditional stock libraries existed, but licensing music directly from independent artists was surprisingly difficult. Because we already knew Creative Commons from publishing, we started exploring whether similar licensing principles could work for music.

This exploration led to the launch of Tribe of Noise in 2008. Musicians could upload their music and experiment with different licensing models, including Creative Commons for part of their repertoire. The goal was simple: make it easier for media makers to find music and for independent musicians to reach audiences and opportunities.

What always impressed me about Creative Commons was the design of the licenses themselves. They operate on three levels: a full legal text, a human-readable explanation, and machine-readable metadata for the web. I still use this layered approach as an example of how one legal framework can serve very different audiences without losing clarity.

Over time I became involved in the Creative Commons Global Network. My hope was that chapters—particularly in Europe—could strengthen each other by sharing knowledge and coordinating efforts, for example in Brussels. In practice this turned out to be harder than expected. Attempts to stimulate collaboration between European chapters generated interest but rarely translated into sustained joint initiatives.

During those years I also occasionally challenged Creative Commons headquarters to take stronger positions on issues affecting contemporary creators.

Creative Commons has been extremely successful in opening access to cultural heritage and knowledge, particularly through partnerships with museums, archives, libraries, and educational institutions. Those efforts have unlocked enormous amounts of material for the public.

At the same time, I sometimes felt that less attention was given to the position of current and future creators. The internet has made sharing easier than ever, but it has also created new asymmetries of power where large technology platforms benefit from creative work produced by millions of individuals.

This tension became even more visible with the rise of artificial intelligence. As AI systems began training on massive amounts of online content—including openly licensed works—I raised concerns that creators’ work was being scraped to build systems that might eventually compete with them.

Within Creative Commons there were thoughtful discussions about AI, but some argued that AI was not primarily a copyright issue and therefore outside the organization’s scope. From a strict legal perspective that may make sense, but from the perspective of creators the connection feels obvious.

Despite these debates, my appreciation for Creative Commons licenses has never changed. They remain one of the most elegant legal tools created for the internet: understandable, globally applicable, and strong enough to stand up in court.

A moment that captured the spirit of the commons for me happened when the future of the Free Music Archive became uncertain.

Creative Commons headquarters reached out and asked whether I might be willing to help keep the archive alive. The initial conversation was about the possibility of making a substantial financial contribution to support the project. During that discussion the question gradually shifted: instead of supporting the archive from the outside, would we consider taking responsibility for its future?

Our answer was that if we were to take on that responsibility, we wanted to do it properly. We committed to rebuilding the entire digital infrastructure of the archive to make it far more stable and reliable. The goal was simple: reduce outages to almost zero and ensure that this commons of music could remain accessible to creators around the world.

That is exactly what we did.

For me that moment captured something essential about the commons: it survives because people step in when it matters.

The commons is not only about preserving culture from the past. It is also about ensuring that the next generation of creators can contribute to—and benefit from—a shared cultural ecosystem.

Creative Commons has provided the legal infrastructure for that ecosystem. The challenge ahead is making sure the creators who sustain it also have a future within it.