The business of Creative Commons

Posted 10/02/2010 by jaimes

Jonathon ran and publicly commented on an experiment with a set of pictures of well known Creative Commons activist Cory Doctorow. He released the images under a Creative Commons licence alongside a ‘sliding scale’ array of prints and other formats.

Jonathon’s clear and concise thinking around this experiment is well worth a read for creatives wondering how CC licencing affects them, but also for those with a wider interest in how the net and digital affects pricing.

In short, Jonathon reports that he gathered more revenue for this experiment from print sales and alternative revenue than he usually would from syndication, but that this could largely be attributed to a perfect storm of Cory’s advocacy of CC and dissemination of the work and the uniqueness of the experiement. Nevertheless, he does argue for a powerful set of ‘perceivable non-material benefits’ such as publicity and additional reach that occurred as a result of the experiment. He says he is continuing to integrate the learnings from this practice into his work.

One of the most interesting aspects of his learnings is the emphasis on a ‘creative event’ rather than digital images as the primary output.