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cc-lessigletter - [cc-lessigletter] Commoner Letter #2 - Cory Doctorow

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  • From: "Lawrence Lessig" <larry AT creativecommons.org>
  • To: cc-lessigletter AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [cc-lessigletter] Commoner Letter #2 - Cory Doctorow
  • Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2007 10:41:49 -0700

Two weeks ago I sent you a letter from Evan Prodromou, who wrote to
you about the power of collaboratively created Free culture and the
role CC plays in enabling that culture to flourish. This week's letter
comes to you from Cory Doctorow.

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To the Commoners community, from Cory Doctorow:

My writing career and Creative Commons are inextricably bound
together. My first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
(http://craphound.com/down/), was published by Tor, the largest
science fiction publisher in the world, on January 9, 2003, just a few
days after CC launched its first licenses. I was the first author to
use the licenses, applying them to my book and releasing it for free
online on the same day it appeared in stores. Today, the book has been
through more printings than I can keep track of, been translated into
more languages than I know, and has been downloaded more than 750,000
times from my site alone (I don't know the total number of downloads,
because, of course, anyone is free to redistribute it).

I've applied Creative Commons licenses to all my books since,
including the comics that IDW just adapted from six of my short
stories. I use CC for my speeches, for my articles and op-eds, and for
articles and stories that I write for "straight" magazines from Forbes
to Radar. My co-editors and I use CC licenses for our popular blog,
Boing Boing, one of the most widely read blogs in the world. These
licenses have allowed my work to spread far and wide, into corners of
the world I never could have reached. I hear from sailors on
battleships, volunteers working in the developing world, kids in
underfunded school-districts, and people who "don't usually read this
sort of thing" but found my work because a friend was able to
introduce them to it. My readers have made innumerable technical
remixes, fan-fic installments, fan-art drawings, songs, translations
and other fun and inspiring creative works from mine, each time
humbling and inspiring me (and enriching me!).

CC turns my books from nouns into verbs. My books *do stuff*, get
passed around and recut and remade to suit the needs of each reader,
turned to their hand the way that humans always have adapted their
tools and stories to fit their circumstances. As Tim O'Reilly says, my
problem is not piracy, it's obscurity, and CC licenses turn my books
into dandelion seeds, able to blow in the wind and find every crack in
every sidewalk, sprouting up in unexpected places. Each seed is a
possibility, an opportunity for someone out there to buy a physical
copy of the book, to commission work from me, to bring me in for a
speech. I once sold a reprint of an article of mine to an editor who
saw it in a spam message -- the spammer had pasted it into the "word
salad" at the bottom of his boner-pill pitch to get past the filters.
The editor read the piece, liked it, googled me, and sent me a check.

CC lets me be financially successful, but it also lets me attain
artistic and ethical success. Ethical in the sense that CC licenses
give my readers a legal framework to do what readers have always done
in meatspace: pass the works they love back and forth, telling each
other stories the way humans do. Artistic because we live in the era
of copying, the era when restricting copying is a fool's errand, and
by CC gives me an artistic framework to embrace copying rather than
damning it.

Writers all over the world are adopting CC licenses, creating an
artistic movement that treats copying as a feature, not a bug. As a
science fiction writer, this is enormously satisfying: here we have
artists who are acting as though they live in the future, not the
past. CC is changing the world, making it safe for copying, and just
in time, too.


If you'd like to be spared these letters over then next three months,
visit http://creativecommons.org/about/lessigletter#unsubscribe

----------------------------------

This email is part of a bi-weekly series of letters written by members
of the Creative Commons community. If you would like to be removed
from this list, please click here:
http://creativecommons.org/about/lessigletter#unsubscribe

Alternatively, if you know others who might find these interesting,
please recommend they sign up at
http://creativecommons.org/about/lessigletter

Support the Commons
http://support.creativecommons.org

To link to this message, go to:
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7774

Archive of Lessig Letters
http://support.creativecommons.org/letters

Learn about CC, including comics and movies
http://creativecommons.org/learnmore



  • [cc-lessigletter] Commoner Letter #2 - Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, 10/29/2007

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