[cc-community] PRESS RELEASE: Creative Commons Announces New Leadership, New Funding

Gavin Baker gavin at gavinbaker.com
Tue Apr 1 18:19:34 EDT 2008


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I'm noticing a trend where Larry hands off his former position to Joi. I
figure in about 18 months, Joi will be running Change Congress ;)

Eric Steuer wrote:
| PDF attached; text below
| ==
|
| Creative Commons Announces New Leadership, New Funding
|
| San Francisco, CA, USA — April 1, 2008
|
| Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that works to expand the
| body of creative work available to the public for legal sharing and
| use, today announced both a leadership evolution and a major new grant
| of $4 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to support
| its activities. "Both pieces of news we are announcing today reflect
| Creative Commons' maturation from a startup into crucial
| infrastructure for creativity, education, and research in the digital
| age," said the organization's founder, Stanford law professor Lawrence
| Lessig. Creative Commons celebrated its fifth anniversary last
| December.
|
| Lessig has announced a shift of academic focus from copyright to
| political corruption. He recently launched Change Congress, a movement
| to increase transparency in the US government's legislative branch. In
| order to concentrate on this effort, Lessig is stepping down as CEO of
| Creative Commons. He will be replaced by entrepreneur, venture
| capitalist, and free culture advocate Joi Ito. Lessig will remain on
| the Creative Commons board.
|
| "Although I have changed my focus, I'm still very much committed to
| Creative Commons and the Free Culture cause," Lessig said. "The work I
| intend to do with Change Congress is in many ways complementary to the
| work of Creative Commons. Both projects are about putting people in
| power and enabling them to build a better system. I could not be more
| pleased to hand off the leadership of Creative Commons to the
| extraordinarily passionate and qualified Joi Ito."
|
| "Under Larry's management, Creative Commons has grown from an
| inspirational idea to an essential part of the technical, social, and
| legal landscape involving organizations and people in 80 countries,"
| said Ito. "With it, the organization has grown in size and complexity,
| and I am excited to increase the level of my participation to help
| manage this amazing group of people. The Hewlett Foundation has been a
| major supporter of ours from the beginning and we could not be more
| grateful for their support going forward into the future."
|
| Founding board member and Duke law professor James Boyle will become
| chair of the board, replacing Ito, who remains on the board. "Jamie
| has demonstrated his commitment to Creative Commons from its
| founding," said Lessig. "He led the formation of Science Commons and
| ccLearn, our divisions focused on scientific research and education
| respectively. There is no person better suited to lead the Creative
| Commons board."
|
| Boyle is optimistic about Creative Commons' future. "If one looks at
| all the amazing material that has been placed under our licenses –
| from MIT's Open Courseware and the Public Library of Science to great
| music, from countless photographs and blogs to open textbooks – one
| realizes that, under Larry's leadership, the organization has actually
| helped build a global 'creative commons' in which millions of people
| around the world participate, either as creators or users. My job will
| be to use the skills of the remarkable people on our board – including
| a guy called Larry Lessig, who has promised me he isn't going away any
| time soon – to make sure that mission continues and expands."
|
| The Hewlett Foundation grant consists of $2.5 million to provide
| general support to Creative Commons over five years and $1.5 million
| to support ccLearn, the division of Creative Commons that is focused
| on open educational resources. "The William and Flora Hewlett
| Foundation has been a strong supporter of openness and open
| educational resources in particular," said Catherine Casserly, the
| Director of the Open Educational Resources Initiative at Hewlett.
| "Creative Commons licenses are a critical part of the infrastructure
| of openness on which those efforts depend." The Hewlett grant was a
| vital part of a five-year funding plan which also saw promises of
| support from Omidyar Network, Google, Mozilla, Red Hat, and the
| Creative Commons board.
|
| Creative Commons also announces two other senior staff changes. Diane
| Peters joins the organization as General Counsel. Peters arrives from
| the Mozilla Corporation, serves on the board of the Software Freedom
| Law Center, and was previously General Counsel for Open Source
| Development Labs and the Linux Foundation. She has extensive
| experience collaborating with and advising nonprofit organizations,
| development communities, and high-tech companies on a variety of
| matters.
|
| Vice President and General Counsel Virginia Rutledge, who joined
| Creative Commons last year from Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, will take
| on a new role as Vice President and Special Counsel. In her new role,
| Rutledge will focus on development and external relations, while
| continuing to lead special legal projects.
|
|
| About Creative Commons
|
| Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001,
| that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works,
| whether owned or in the public domain. Through its free copyright
| licenses, Creative Commons offers authors, artists, scientists, and
| educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms
| that build upon the "all rights reserved" concept of traditional
| copyright to enable a voluntary "some rights reserved" approach.
| Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by the generous
| support of organizations including the Center for the Public Domain,
| Omidyar Network, the Rockefeller Foundation, the John D. and Catherine
| T. MacArthur Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation,
| as well as members of the public. For more information about Creative
| Commons, visit http://creativecommons.org.
|
|
| Contact
|
| Eric Steuer
| Creative Director, Creative Commons
| eric at creativecommons.org
|
|
| Press Kit
|
| http://creativecommons.org/presskit
|
|
| ------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
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- --
Gavin Baker
http://www.gavinbaker.com/
gavin at gavinbaker.com

No, I do not weep at the world -- I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
~    Zora Neale Hurston
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