I don’t fully remember when I first discovered Creative Commons, but I distinctly remember the time I first started thinking about it: I have been for the longest time I can remember a fan of free software (we tend to call it open source software these days) and from the mid-1990s onwards I’ve been using, writing and trying to make a living out of it. At some point in 2004, I remember hearing about Creative Commons because a hardback book showed up at my house. It was a copy of “Free Culture” by Larry Lessig. I don’t remember how far into it I got, but I know I started reading it on the way to work, read some more during my lunch break and stopped reading at some point that same day. It was a revelation to me, and from that day onwards I’ve been a fan of both free software and free culture and I’ve tried to marry the two in my life ever since since to me they make the perfect partnership.

This all started for me back in 1993. In 1993 I had something very few people had: I had a website. Nobody else I knew had a website, almost nobody else I knew even knew what a website was. My access to the internet was infrequent and expensive, so my website didn’t change too often. But I was very interested in the web and the internet and I knew I wanted to do something with that. My computer wasn’t much, it had a built in cassette player for software and updating my website meant dialing (slowly) into another computer elsewhere. Nowadays this is called cloud computing and is ruining things for everyone, but back then it was called a shell account and was quite a nice thing. By this point in time, I was already aware of free software. My shell account had quite a lot of it and I even had a few programs on disk for my home computer (staunch defender of cassette tapes for sharing software, even I had to admit that adding a disk drive made using it a lot nicer) and it made a lot of sense to me. I wanted to make sure my next computer could run Linux.

Now in 1993 putting video my website wasn’t something I’d considered (images weren’t even a thing on websites at the time) but I was very interested in making videos, so I took a VHS camcorder and went to visit the offices of my favorite computer magazine — Amstrad Action — on a school day trip to Bath. I don’t think I ever did anything with the footage, because editing meant laboriously playing the tape and recording a copy on another VCR. It was dull. In 1999, I started writing a movie about a pigeon. I don’t think we ever filmed more than a few scenes, and editing those together on a computer felt like even of a chore than the VHS editing process did at the time but I do remember watching back the few minutes of footage on my computer, and I wanted more of that.

I’ve never had a great relationship with the idea of “All Rights Reserved” — whenever I’ve written things for other people, I’ve always felt like I wanted to be able to do more with it than the people I was working for would let me, but working for other people who had better equipment than I did felt like it would be the only way I’d ever get anything I wanted to make seen by anyone else, because software something that hobbyists and tinkerers could do, whereas video was expensive and something for the very serious people in industry. This feeling stuck with me for a long, long time.

Then along came digital video and Firewire. Suddenly if you had a computer with a Firewire port (all the new Macs had one, some Sony laptops had one) and a video camera that had one you could suddenly edit video in a way that didn’t feel like a chore. And by now websites did support images. We even had multiple incompatible ways to put videos on websites. Suddenly everything started to fall into place. I could write things on my computer, film them, edit them and put them on the web for people to find them and watch them. Of course, most people wouldn’t watch them and they were hard to find and playing them was still more of a chore than it ought to be, but things were getting a lot better and quickly. And you could easily make a DVD from your video and burn it to a DVD. Steve Jobs was definitely doing it with all of his holiday photos.

When I read (some of) “Free Culture”, I started to think about what it might be like if we could take the ideas of free software and Linux, and apply those to videos. We could take pieces of other people’s videos and put them in our own. Legally, too. I set about making a website all about this, and pretty quickly I stopped worrying about people finding my own things as I’d stopped making things to make a website about making things instead. I started telling everyone I met about this website, and people really liked the idea. People still didn’t do anything about it, because it was still really difficult to get people to watch things but the idea was cool. I told people if they made something to email me, and I’d put it on my website. I would take all the hassle out of putting it online and do it for them!

YouTube is an American online video sharing platform owned by Google¹

I will admit I didn’t initially hear about YouTube because at the time YouTube needed Flash Player to play videos and by this time I’d installed Linux on my Mac and therefore couldn’t use Flash Player if I wanted to, so I definitely missed out on some of that early YouTube hype and have consistently failed to realize that goal of getting everyone to share things and put them on my website. That website no longer exists, but in making that website I did get to work on things with the Students for Free Culture and help start Free Culture UK. I also got a job working full time on free software stuff, and then a different job working on even more free software stuff, but it didn’t matter because of the next few things that happened.

Firstly, while working at this free software job I got to include Creative Commons licenses into the project: I was building a social network for scientists. Secondly, while working at this job some friends of mine started working on an ambitious video project that used free culture licenses, and I got to write and (almost) “star” in an episode. And then finally, I got to wrap all of this stuff up in a video about free software, written by me and starring none other than Stephen Fry! It’s on YouTube (amongst other places) and I’m hugely proud of it, even almost 20 years later.

That video got me a job at the Free Software Foundation and I moved to the US. I got to know lots of very cool people who knew all about free software and free culture. In 2009, I put all my work on free software and free culture together finally and launched Libre.fm, a music community website for keeping track of your listening habits and discovering new free culture music. Later I even got to work at Creative Commons for a while. And in 2015, everything finally came together when I launched my crowdfunding campaign for my film: “Orang-U: An Ape Goes To College” — the first feature length live action movie written and edited with free software! Or so I think. I haven’t found anything which suggests this isn’t true. I got to show it off back at the Creative Commons summit in Toronto back in 2018!

I took this whole story and turned it into a one-man show and toured it across the UK back in 2015. I was interviewed for Computerphile about my work with free software and that video continues to get me recognized in the most unlikeliest of places. Libre.fm still exists too. 17 years later, I’m still running it and still working on it. It has over 387,000 users and they’ve listened to a combined 328,477,987 songs. Every single one of those listens has a unique URL like a social media post and each of those posts is also licensed under a free culture license. Libre.fm also spun off a social network of its own along the way and eventually that work would emerge into the Mastodon project which remains forever under a free software license due to the initial concerns about keeping things compatible with Libre.fm.

And my movie had a spin-off tie-in book as all low budget movies are supposed to, and we’re currently working on a whole batch of sequels to be filmed at some point in the next few years as time and money allow. I’m still working on all things free: looking at tabletop games and yet more weird and interesting software projects for the future, while trying to find a job and avoid the so-called “AI” scrapers and bots which seek to destroy all this hard work for all of us.