We’re pleased to introduce four new members to our Board: Alwaleed Alkhaja, Melissa Hagemann, Melissa Omino, and Colin Sullivan. 

Familiar faces within the CC community, Alwaleed, Melissa, Melissa,  and Colin bring prior experience within our organization, having previously partnered with us as community advocates with a history of dedicated support for the open movement.

Each of our new Board members brings a unique expertise that will help strengthen CC’s impact and guide our strategic vision forward. Their diverse backgrounds and commitment to the open movement strengthen our already dedicated Board, representing exactly what we need as we continue to grow and evolve our work to achieve our 2025-2028 goals.

Alwaleed Alkhaja

Alwaleed Alkhaja serves as the Head of Open Access and Copyright at the Qatar National Library, where he oversees the library’s open access program and all copyright-related matters. Throughout his academic and professional career, he has held various roles in open access publishing and open science. His experience ranges from editorial positions at Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals to overseeing academic publishing at Hamad bin Khalifa University Press/QScience.com (the first open access publisher in Qatar).

Alwaleed’s passion for open science is rooted in his background in scientific research. He earned a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Leeds and received his master’s and PhD in Molecular Biology from the Max Planck International School of Molecular Biology in Göttingen, Germany. He also holds an MBA from the University of Manchester. Alwaleed voluntarily supports several international organizations, including serving on the board of Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) and advisory board of the Forum for Open Research in MENA (FORM).

In his free time, he enjoys photography and exploring experimental techniques, including macro photography, pinhole photography (constructing a room-sized camera obscura), cyanotype printing, and infrared photography.

Melissa Hagemann

Melissa Hagemann has been at the forefront of the Access to Knowledge movement for over twenty years. She managed the Open Society Foundations’ work to define open access to research through the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) and went on to support the development of the global open access movement. To mark the 20th anniversary of the BOAI, she spearheaded the development of new recommendations which emphasize that open access is not an end in itself, but a means to further ends, above all, to the equity, quality, sustainability, and usability of research. Currently she is the Director of the BOAI Org, which advocates for the equitable development of open access globally.

Melissa co-organized the meeting that led to the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, which offered strategies for the growth of the global open education movement. In addition, she supported the advancement of progressive copyright reform at the national and international levels.

She has served on numerous boards, including the Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as the Open Climate Campaign. 

Melissa Omino

Dr Melissa Omino is currently the Director of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law (CIPIT) at Strathmore University, where she oversees the research direction of the leading Eastern African AI Policy Hub and Data Governance Policy Centre with a range of funding partners that includes the IDRC, Hewlett Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Open AIR.

Her research direction is focused on utilizing an African lens and a Human Rights lens. Part of the research conducted under Dr Omino’s leadership at CIPIT involved mapping AI applications in Africa as the initial step in answering the question of what determines African AI and the problems it aims to solve in Africa. Dr Omino is also an intellectual property (IP) expert with a research focus on the development and negotiation of IP provisions in international trade agreements by and with Global South countries.

She has served as an Advisory Board member in several African and Global Projects that intersect between AI and IP, including a National AI Strategy Process, and leading the IP Advisory to a global entity funding AI research in Africa. 

Colin Sullivan

Colin Sullivan is the General Counsel at Patreon, where he oversees the operations teams that ensure the platform remains a safe and stable home for creators. His responsibilities include leading the legal, trust & safety, payment operations, fraud and compliance teams. With a focus on protecting creators and maintaining a trustworthy environment, Colin plays a pivotal role in Patreon’s mission of funding the creative class and safeguarding their creative freedom. Before joining Patreon, Colin founded his own law firm where he served as outside general counsel to entrepreneurs and startups.

A Big Thank You to Alek Tarkowski

Please join us in thanking outgoing CC Board member, Alek Tarkowski who completed his five year term at the end of 2024. Alek is the Director of Strategy at Open Future and brought to the CC Board over 15 years of experience with public interest advocacy, movement building and research into the intersection of society, culture and digital technologies. As a longtime CC community member, in 2005, he co-founded Creative Commons Poland. During his time on the Board, Alex supported the development of CC’s organizational strategy and provided leadership in developing CC’s approach to sharing in the age of AI. Thankfully, Alek won’t be going too far away as he now joins the CC Advisory Council. 

Welcome Alwaleed. Melissa, Melissa, and Colin, and thank you Alek!

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Creative Commons (CC) has—and continues to be—fortunate to have an expert and passionate board of directors, many of whom have been instrumental to the success of CC at both the organizational level, as well as nationally and regionally. A healthy board of directors regularly welcomes new members following its bylaws, which means that we must also say goodbye to board members who have completed their term of service on our volunteer board.

Effective October 30, 2024, Angela Oduor Lungati has been voted by the CC board of directors as CC board chair for a term of two years, replacing Delia Browne who served as chair of the board from late 2022. Glenn O. Brown will continue his service as vice chair of the board. “It has been a tremendous pleasure and privilege to work with Delia and Angela. Their expertise, integrity, global perspectives, and down-to-earth demeanors make them ideal teammates and leaders for the org. I am thrilled to continue to work with Angela in her tenure as chair, with Anna as CEO, and with the great teams they lead,” says Glenn.

Meet Angela Oduor Lungati, CC’s New Board Chair

Angela is a technologist, community builder, and open source software advocate passionate about building and using appropriate technology tools to impact the lives of marginalized groups. She has over ten years of experience in software development, global community engagement, and non-profit organizational management.

Angela is the Executive Director at Ushahidi, a global non-profit technology company that helps communities quickly collect and share information that enables them to raise voices, inform decisions, and influence change. In addition to her service on the CC board of directors, Angela is a member of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team board of directors. She is also a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on Data Equity, and was recently named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2024 and a Mozilla 2024 Rise25 Honoree. 

Angela joined the Creative Commons board in 2021. Her tenure as board chair begins at the same time as CC launches its refreshed strategic plan, which charts the path for sustaining and advancing CC’s open infrastructure of sharing, and advocating for and defending a thriving creative commons. As the first CC board chair from Kenya, Angela’s commitment to centering the global community at a time of immense change and innovation will steer CC into a future of sharing in the age of generative AI.

“I’m thrilled to be appointed the chair of the CC board of directors by my fellow board colleagues. I look forward to collaborating with the CC team and, of course, open advocates and all those who contribute to a thriving commons globally. In particular, I’m keen to support CC as it shifts towards a model of movement building alongside a global community as we accomplish more together than we can apart,” says Angela. 

Celebrating and Giving Gratitude to Delia Browne

This is also a bittersweet moment for CC as we celebrate the accomplishments of Delia Browne, who has been the CC board chair since 2022, and a board member since 2018, as she steps down from the board following the end of her term. Delia’s energy, directness, and unwavering commitment to CC will be sorely missed and we are so thankful for her many contributions over the years. For those of you who haven’t had the chance to meet her, Delia is a copyright lawyer and policy advocate who leads the National Copyright Unit (NCU) in Australia, providing specialist copyright advice to Australian Schools and Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institutes with a focus on the rapidly changing digital teaching environment. Delia is a co-founder of Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) and a board director of the Australian Digital Alliance. She is also a member of the editorial board of Media and Arts Law Review and has taught Intellectual Property at the University of New Wales, Griffith University, and the University of Auckland (her alma mater). Delia has also represented Creative Commons at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) at the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights. Perhaps most significantly for us, though, Delia is a long time member of the CC Global Network.

Delia’s contributions to CC are far too many to list, but we’d like to highlight a few in an effort to capture the powerhouse that is Delia Browne:

• Delia has attended every CC Global Summit since 2007.
• Delia represented CC at the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights and is dedicated to furthering the WIPO Limitations and Exception agenda, particularly with regard to education.
• Delia was a key member of the community team that authored CC’s Global Network Strategy in 2017.
• Delia oversaw and supported a CEO transition in early 2024.
• Delia was CC’s first chair appointed from outside the United States, providing a global lens to CC’s strategy and priorities at the board level.

“Throughout my time on the CC board of directors, we’ve navigated immense change and capitalized on opportunities that drive us towards CC vision. It has been an honor to work with my fellow board colleagues and collaborators over the last seven years and I’m so pleased to hand the baton to Angie who will continue to guide the organization into the future,” says Delia.

Thankfully, Delia won’t be going too far as she will now join the CC Advisory Council and will be actively involved in supporting CC’s strategic efforts with regards to sharing in an age of generative AI. On behalf of the CC global community, board of directors, and team, we wish to thank Delia for her unwavering support, and we look forward to working with you in this new capacity.

Other CC Board Updates

The CC Board’s Governance & Nominations committee is currently wrapping up new board member recruitment and anticipates that we will welcome several new board members in the coming months.

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We are at a pivotal moment in the development of Creative Commons. As we focus on CC’s strategic goal of accelerating better sharing and prepare for the first CC Global Summit since 2019 in Mexico City this October, the insights of Marta, James, and Luis will be invaluable.

Their appointment was made possible through an open nomination process steered by the Governance and Nominations Committee Chair, Carolina Botero, who harnessed the insights of the CC Global Network. I would like to thank the committee for their work, and a hearty welcome to Marta, James, and Luis. Let us all welcome them with open arms as they embark on their journey with us.

About the new board members:

Marta Belcher

Photo courtesy of Marta

Marta Belcher holds multiple esteemed positions in the tech and legal sectors, notably serving as President and Chair of the Filecoin Foundation and the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. Additionally, she is the General Counsel and Head of Policy at Protocol Labs. She also lends her expertise to the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a Special Counsel. Marta is also a Board member of the Blockchain Association and the Zcash Foundation, and a member of Paradigm’s Crypto Policy Council. Marta is a pioneer in blockchain law and policy, and has testified in Congress and state legislatures, as well as speaking in European Parliament. Marta was previously an intellectual property litigator at Ropes & Gray, and has submitted briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court and U.S. appellate courts for high-profile public interest organizations, including EFF, the Center for Democracy & Technology, Public Knowledge, the Cato Institute, the National Consumers’ League, the Blockchain Association, and Project Gutenberg. Marta has been recognized by the Financial Times Innovative Lawyer awards, by Law360’s list of Top Attorneys Under 40, by CryptoWeekly’s list of Most Influential Women in Crypto, and as Business Intelligence Group’s Woman of the Year.

James Grimmelmann

Photo courtesy of James

James Grimmelmann is the Tessler Family Professor of Digital and Information Law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School. His work is primarily focused on how laws regulating software affect freedom, wealth, and power. His role often involves helping lawyers and technologists understand each other, and he’s applied concepts from computer science to tackle legal problems. He’s also written a casebook titled “Internet Law: Cases and Problems” and over fifty articles on a range of topics within computer and internet law. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and an A.B. in computer science from Harvard College. Before law school, he worked as a programmer for Microsoft; after graduation, he clerked for a federal appellate judge. He is an affiliated fellow of the Yale Information Society Project. He previously taught at New York Law School, Georgetown, and the University of Maryland. He has written for Slate, Salon, Wired, Ars Technica, and Publishers Weekly; he is a regular source of expert commentary for major news media including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and All Things Considered. He and his students created the Public Index website to inform the public about the Google Books settlement.

Luis Villa

“Luis Villa” by Myleen Hollero / Wikimedia Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Luis Villa has made significant contributions to the open community since the late 90s, taking on a multitude of roles. He started as a developer, later transitioning into legal and board positions. His experience spans renowned organizations like Mozilla and the Wikimedia Foundation, where he held critical positions. In addition, he has provided legal counsel to a spectrum of companies, from small startups to giant Silicon Valley firms. His involvement in the open-source community extends beyond his professional roles. As a community member and informal advisor, he has worked with organizations such as Open Street Map, the Open Knowledge Foundation, the World Wide Web Consortium, and OpenETdata.org. Luis is also a co-founder and General Counsel at Tidelift, where the mission is making open source work better for everyone, including the maintainers behind the projects we all rely on, and the enterprises benefiting from their creations.

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These outstanding new Directors were selected following an open nomination process that harnessed the insights of the CC Global Network, led by Governance and Nominations Committee Chair Carolina Botero. Please join me in thanking Carolina for that service and in extending a warm welcome to Jeni, Angela, and Glenn!

About the new board members:

Angela Oduor Lungati

Angela is a technologist, community builder, and open-source software advocate who is passionate about building and using appropriate technology tools to create an impact in the lives of marginalized groups. She’s a first class honors’ graduate from Strathmore University, with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Information Technology. She has over ten years of experience in software development, global community engagement, and non-profit organizational management. She currently serves as the Executive Director at Ushahidi, a global non-profit technology company that helps communities quickly collect and share information that enables them to raise voices, inform decisions and influence change. She previously served as the Director of Community Engagement, creating and managing programs for Ushahidi’s diverse global community. She is also a co-founder of AkiraChix, a non-profit organization that nurtures generations of women who use technology to develop innovations and solutions for Africa. Angela joined us as a keynote speaker at this year’s Creative Commons Global Summit, and she was recently featured on an episode of our Open Minds podcast. 

Glenn Otis Brown

Glenn O. Brown works with a range of organizations on brand and identity, audience development, team building, and fundraising. In addition to advising start-ups and corporations, Glenn is on the board of directors of nonprofits The Texas Tribune and Words Without Borders, and is a senior advisor at MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication. Glenn has worked in creative and business roles at the intersection of media and technology at The Obama Foundation (Chief Digital Officer 2016-2020), Betaworks (Entrepreneur in Residence 2015-2016), Twitter (co-founder of Twitter Amplify video marketplace 2011-2015), and YouTube (head of U.S. music partnerships 2007-2011), and Google/YouTube (product counsel, 2005-2007). From 2002-2005, Glenn was CEO of Creative Commons, where he managed the launch of the first CC licenses and visual design framework, coined the phrase “Some Rights Reserved,” and drove early CC adoption among creators, communities, and platforms around the world. Glenn is a long-time movie buff, book lover, and amateur musician. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Austin, Texas.

Jeni Tennison

Jeni Tennison is the Vice President and Chief Strategy Adviser of the Open Data Institute, which is a UK based non-profit with a mission to work with companies and governments to build an open, trustworthy data ecosystem. She earned her PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Nottingham in the UK, then worked as an independent consultant, specializing in open data publishing and consumption. She was the technical architect and lead developer behind legislation.gov.uk, before joining the ODI as Technical Director in 2012, becoming CEO in 2016, and Vice President in 2020. She has a long-standing interest in open and web standards, served on the W3C’s Technical Architecture Group from 2011 to 2015, and co-chaired the W3C’s CSV on the Web Working Group. She is the co-chair of the Data Governance Working Group within the Global Partnership on AI, and sits on the Advisory Boards for the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data and the Information Law and Policy Centre. She loves board games and is the proud co-creator of the open data board game, Datopolis.

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I’m delighted to announce that Paul Brest has been elected chair of the Creative Commons board. Paul will begin as chair in December, coinciding with CC’s tenth anniversary celebrations.

Throughout his career, Paul has bridged the worlds of law, philanthropy, and academia, most recently as president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and, before that, dean of Stanford Law School. He’s widely recognized as an expert on constitutional law, problem solving and decision making, and philanthropic strategy, having written books and taught classes at Stanford on these subjects.

I can’t think of a better choice than Paul. He has that rare combination of strong instincts and the knowledge and rigor to back those instincts up. He’s the leader we need to carry CC into the next decade.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to recognize Joi Ito for his years of service as chair. During Joi’s time as chair, he’s helped CC grow as an organization, both in global influence and in its relevance to a changing technology landscape.

Please join me in thanking Joi and welcoming Paul.

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Mike Carroll by Joi Ito / CC BY

Mike Carroll was a practicing lawyer in Washington DC when the idea of openly licensed copyright landed on his desk as a pro bono project. “It was going to be a central repository of content, where we had the copyright and would openly license it to others,” he says. After a group brainstorm led by Larry Lessig at the Harvard Berkman Center in May 2001, the lawyers decided to scrap the central repository idea and create licenses that others could use freely. Shortly after that, Carroll was invited to join the board of the organization that would soon become known as Creative Commons.

CC quickly evolved from an idea that artists were skeptical about—why would any creative person be willing to give up control?—to something that proliferated across state borders and disciplines.

“The Internet is global, and we knew we would have to grapple with the complexities of international copyright and that we would add science to the mix,” he says. “But the pressure to do that came much faster than we expected. In short order, we had to organize a pretty sophisticated operation on a limited budget to engage with the international network of support for the Creative Commons idea.”

Still, Carroll says, there are challenges ahead. “We are offering tools as a solution to a problem that not everyone knows they have.” For one thing, awareness about what open content is, and why making it legally open matters, is still a bit hazy for some. The good news is that some web sites have seamlessly integrated CC into their functions, like the Flickr search engine. The challenge is to engage with the continuing evolution of the web to make sure adopting CC is easy and natural.

“We care deeply about not getting locked into things that can’t evolve as the web evolves. If it were easier to find reliable CC content, that makes using CC licenses more attractive. We’re trying to keep the web open in an interoperable space—but it’s not just the technology. It’s the values embedded in our technical choices.”

Those values—openness, flexibility, sharing—are a part of Carroll’s life both professionally and personally. Carroll is now the Director of the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University. In conjunction with Creative Commons, he has worked for years with the library community to promote open access to the scholarly and scientific journal literature on web.  He also serves on the National Research Council’s Board on Research Data and Information to address issues such as data sharing among scientists, and he’s a Fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

He’s also a hobby musician who sometimes gets together with other copyright lawyers to jam. “I’m one of those musicians [that loves] to play to the crowd,” he says, in the same spirit of an organization dedicated to helping other creators share.

Support the organization Carroll has been a part of from the very beginning by donating to Creative Commons today.

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Caterina Fake by Richard Morgenstein / CC BY-SA

The first website CC board member Caterina Fake ever made was a fan page for Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov, her favorite writer.  “When I first went online around 1993-1994, every site was just something people had just put up–pictures of their cat, or a marble collection, or Bob Dylan discography. It was just strangers making cool stuff and sharing it online. The Internet was premised on this culture of generosity.”

But as the web grew, so did the rules about copyright and ownership of content. And somewhere along the way, this culture of generosity got lost in lockdown. That’s why, within six months of co-founding Flickr in 2004, Fake made sure that users could upload their photos to her rapidly expanding photo-sharing site with CC licenses. “Flickr is very much a platform for this culture of generosity to take place,” she says. “Creators should be able to choose to make their work available. If they have no interest in the ridiculous restrictions copyright is imposing on people, that should be okay.”

Today, Flickr has over 167 million CC-licensed photos, making it one of the largest repositories of freely shareable images in the world.

In the summer of 2009, Fake started Hunch, a website that builds a “taste graph” of the Internet. Users respond to questions like: “Do you like your sandwich cut vertically or horizontally?” and “When flying, do you prefer a window seat or an aisle seat?” The data collected goes towards finding random correlations on web users and providing recommendations on magazines,TV shows, and books. It’s all part of what Fake is most passionate about, what she calls participatory media.

Fake has been a supporter of sharing creative content from very early on. Before she was even thinking about founding successful web companies, Fake was a painter, sculptor, and writer. “I’m a big proponent of people having the ability to express themselves and be part of a culture that supports creative work,” she says. “I believe everyone who wants to make a living off their work should be more than welcome to do so. And those who do not should also have the ability not to be constrained by copyright.”

Help build a culture of generosity on the web by donating to Creative Commons today.

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Molly Van Houweling by Joi / CC BY

When Molly Van Houweling ran Creative Commons back in 2001, she was the only staff member, working out of a small office on the third floor of the Stanford law school building. Her work there was mundane but critical: taking off from the pivotal meeting among the founders at the Harvard Berkman Center earlier that year, the once-advisee of Larry Lessig was doing paperwork and drafting the legal language that would become the foundation of Creative Commons.

Van Houweling worked with the founding team to settle on the idea of making machine-readable licenses for creative works and to begin designing the infrastructure and drafting the legal language for these licenses. “We received some skeptical responses from people and didn’t do a lot of market testing to guarantee adoption, but moved forward based on the creativity that we were sensing and observing on the Internet.” The free software movement of the 80s and 90s also suggested that there was a market of creativity not motivated by the traditional copyright model of selling things under exclusive rights. From the beginning there was a wide range of CC adopters, including Boing Boing, PLoS, Magnatune, and the MIT OpenCourseWare project.

In the summer of 2002, she handed off the executive director role to Glenn Otis Brown and moved to Michigan to teach law. She has since continued to champion CC by promoting our “some rights reserved” approach at conferences and teaching the principles of CC to her classes.

Today, Van Houweling is a law professor at UC Berkeley, where she teaches classes about copyright and intellectual property. She always starts her classes by explaining the traditional justifications for this body of law–the fear that some creativity might not happen if the creators were not protected from having their work copied and distributed in a way that prevents them from reaping their investment. But she also encourages them to think about how sound this argument is when looking at the bigger picture. “As students have become more familiar with models like CC and the explosion of creativity on the Internet, it’s become easier for them to see the limits to this explanation of copyright protection.”

Creative Commons has influenced her life in other ways, too. Van Houweling is a competitive bicycle racer–she’s the reigning champion in Northern California and Nevada in the women’s individual time trial event and the 2010 winner of the Mt. Hood Cycling Classic stage race. “It’s a big thrill for me when the pictures taken of me are CC licensed,” she says. “Some of the best pictures of me from Mt. Hood were taken by [MetaFilter founder] Matt Haughey and have been used by local papers and on the Mt. Hood Cycling Classic web site.” She’s also an avid traveler who likes to take pictures of food and drink that she encounters on her journeys, and was delighted to find that one of her CC-licensed Flickr photos was used in several Wikipedia entries to illustrate a Spanish herbal brandy. “My creativity was never motivated in a way that had to do with copyright, and it’s much more rewarding now that people don’t have to ask for my permission.”

Join Molly Van Houweling and invest in the future of creativity. Donate to Creative Commons today.

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Meet Creative Commons board member Jimmy Wales. You probably know him best as the founder of Wikipedia. Here, he talks to us about the importance of Creative Commons, why fundraising is hard, and his crazy travel schedule.

Why are you on the CC board?

As the founder of Wikipedia, I am very aware of the importance of thoughtful licensing regimes for creators of content who want to share it with others. We live in an era in which it is really easy for people to share knowledge. Without a legal framework that allows them to do so in the ways that they want, we won’t realize the full benefits of this era.

Why do you support CC and why do you use it on your sites?

I have always been a fan of CC’s approach as a “middle way.” For a long time, we were stuck in a debate about copyright that focused only on two categories of people: the creators who want to maintain their work under traditional copyright, and the “pirates” who want to steal that work and undermine it. What was lost in that dialogue first became obvious in the world of free, open source software: many people are creators but aren’t interested in, nor helped by, traditional copyright. CC recognized that the solutions being created in the world of software had broader applicability to culture.

What, in your opinion, are the challenges that lie ahead for CC?

Billions of people benefit in some way from the work of Creative Commons, but I fear that it is too often overlooked because the work is by nature free of charge, and because it is “infrastructure.”

At Wikipedia, we are able to fund-raise directly from small donors because we are huge, public, and visible, and our community builds something that everyone uses every day. With Wikipedia, we can always know that there will be lots and lots of $30 donors from the heart and soul of the Wikipedia donor community.  It’s harder for Creative Commons.

I’m a donor to Creative Commons, and I encourage other people to be donors as well.  Creative Commons will always have a smaller group of donors, but one that digs deeper because they know how important the work is.

I know you mentioned below that you travel a lot… what’s your daily life like? What are you traveling for? We’d love to get a glimpse of a day in the life of Jimmy Wales!

I’m writing to you from a plane, of course.  I’m not so sure I can explain a “typical day” for me because every day is different.  I’m on my way home to Florida now, and then next week I’m off on one of my maddening multiple-continent journeys.

I’m about to do this:

Tampa->London->Hong Kong->Mumbai->Toronto->Basel->Tampa.

I count 5 changes of continents in there… in 9 days!

Join Jimmy Wales in showing that you care about Creative Commons by donating to CC today.

IMAGE: Lane Hartwell on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation

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Abelson’s latest venture is Google’s App Inventor for Android, an interface that lets anyone visually design games, educational apps, text tools, and other fun products easily. “It should be natural that you can take your cell phone and build a mobile app for your friends on it.” He notes that people tend to experience technology as consumers rather than creators; this, he believes, has the potential to shift.

One of the greatest challenges facing CC, Abelson points out, is parsing the complex, non-intuitive legal language of copyright into something that everyone can use and relate to. “When we started CC there was the Internet, but people could not use it according to the law. Now we’ve built this enormous, wonderful technical infrastructure of communication sharing and reuse, but our institutions are still in gridlock. There’s a tremendous discrepancy between the law and people’s behavior. In order to make it really okay for people to reuse and remix material from another web page, using CC licenses has to be easy. The legal concepts in copyright just aren’t intuitive—they don’t align with the reality of the things people think about.”

Nonetheless, Abelson is optimistic and excited about the future of sharing. “Creative Commons is the foundation of open sharing on the web. Almost everybody uses CC every day. They may not think about it, but they do. We’re able to come together in a way that was never ever possible. To me, that’s what changes humanity.”

Join Hal Abelson in showing that you care about Creative Commons by donating to CC today.

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