complete press contact list for creative commons

["Eric Steuer" <eric AT creativecommons.org>]

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

Attachment: cc_leadership_and_funding.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document