A Collected Memoir

In the Spring of 2001 Larry Lessig recruited me to become the first Executive Director of Creative Commons. When I came on board later that year there was already a report from a consulting company evaluating the germ of the idea. Their report was highly skeptical: why would anyone ever do that? Choose “some rights reserved” when they could hoard them all?

Years later, while serving on the board of Creative Commons, I thought back on that report with some snarky delight when we passed the milestone of 1-billion licensed CC works. That’s a lot of rights shared instead of reserved—and perhaps a lot of mystified consultants!

But I have to confess that there were other CC developments that mystified me at first and then exceeded my wildest expectations. The flourishing of the Creative Commons international community was one of those. My initial reaction to the idea of porting CC licenses for use around the word: that sounds hard; who would ever choose to do that?! My own skepticism was answered again and again over the years. I particularly remember attending the first CC Summit at Harvard Law School in 2005: walking around the Law School grounds with fellow CC board members and marveling at the attendees from around the world. These volunteers were the people who would do that, who would port and translate the words and the philosophy of CC for people around the world who were motivated to share.

I will always be grateful for being a part of the CC community and in particular for witnessing the worldwide CC international movement. People will do the most unpredictable and wonderful things when they are motivated to create and share.