Generated Transcript

[00:00:01] David Hornik
Hi, and welcome to VentureCast. This is the Highway 280 Edition. That’s right. This time I’m driving up Highway 280, heading towards San Francisco. And tonight I’m heading actually up for a reception at the Creative Commons offices in celebration of Creative Commons. So I thought I’d take the opportunity to sort of sing the praises of and share my thoughts about Creative Commons. I am a big fan. For those of you listening who have not seen or are not aware of Creative Commons, it is an organization that’s committed to the essentially freeing up content that would otherwise live, controlled by the shackles of American copyright law and allowing individual copyright holders, folks who have created that content, to make the content available in a more maybe rational or at least more open way. Though the Creative Commons License is essentially a set of licenses that allow you to that content owners can adopt, and then individuals can then make use of that content as defined by the Creative Commons license. So, for example, Venture Blog and venturecast are both licensed under Creative Commons licenses. The particular license that I chose at the outset of creating VentureBlog, this was now, I guess, going on three years ago, was the Attribution License. And essentially what it says is that you may freely copy content from Venture Blog and venturecast now as you see fit, so long as you give full attribution of the content to the content creator, namely me. So if you wanted to reproduce this podcast, you could reproduce it as long as you make sure to be clear that the source of the content is David Hornik at venturecast and point back to the original content. And in fact, my Attribution License says that you can do that and even use it in the context of some commercial endeavor if you so choose. But again, be sure to give me full credit for having created the content. I remember very early on as I was talking with one of my colleagues about Venture Blog and the fact that it was licensed under this Attribution License. He said, well, I don’t understand. Why would you. You’re going to spend all this time. Why would you allow someone to take advantage and copy your content and put it out there? And my answer to him was, well, it’s very simple. My objective with Venture Blog is not to make money from ad sales or to make money from selling the Venture Blog book, or any of that. My objective with Venture Blog was to sort of share knowledge and understanding of the venture industry and have a conversation with the entrepreneurial community. And there was no reason that that needed to happen only at Venture Blog as long as People appreciated that it was a conversation that I had engaged in and that the source of this content was Venture Blog and was David Hornik at August Capital. Then my goal was achieved and people could feel free to spread the content as they saw fit. And after sort of describing that and explaining how Creative Commons made that possible, my colleagues said, oh, that makes a pile of sense. I didn’t realize that there was the opportunity to do that. Well, that opportunity, the ability to allow that sort of copying of your content and spreading of your content in a way that could prove meaningful for you in this broadly disseminated world, is only the result of Creative Commons. And so I’m a big fan. And frankly, I remember a specific instance early on on my blogging. I was reading someone’s post, Scott Loftusness, who is a friend and a great smart writer and thinker, and he had a post, and I don’t recall the specific content of the post, but he had written about something that I thought was interesting and smart, and I wanted to quote him wholesale. I didn’t want to quote some piece or snippet. I wanted to quote the whole thing. And ordinarily, one, bloggers and others might simply just chop the whole thing and throw it in their blog and be done with it. I, however, was, as a former intellectual property attorney, was sensitive to the fact that there was nothing that I saw on his blog that suggested that I had the ability or right to do that. And so I sent him an email and asked if I could have permission if he would grant me a license, if you will, to republish his content, which, of course he had happily grant it to me. And I remember thinking at the time, boy, if he simply had a Creative Commons license, then I could have made good use of his content without having to have this email exchange. So there you have it. I’m a big fan of the Creative Commons idea of Professor Lessig’s free culture movement. And for those of you also listening who haven’t had the good fortune to see Professor Lessig give a presentation on free culture, haven’t found it on the web. It really is just, I think, incredibly important, but also incredibly entertaining conversation from a man who is one of the sort of Great Artists of PowerPoint, and I’ve written about that before. If you go to VentureBlog, you can search on VentureBlog and find my post called the Power of PowerPoint, where I talk about what I really do view as sort of the artistry of Professor Lessig’s presentations using PowerPoint. So I’m heading up to the Creative Commons reception, hoping to chat with a few people there to get their take on why they’re there and supportive and excited about Creative Commons. And so with all good luck, I’ll have some more good content for you from here on. So there you have it. Thanks for listening. And here’s some commentary from the party.

[00:06:50] David Hornik
Here with Joi Ito, who’s on the board of Creative Commons. Joi, why is it that you support Creative Commons?

[00:06:57] Joi Ito
Well, I am a venture capitalist and entrepreneur and I think that the current regime for copyright fundamentally protects monopolies. And I think that for innovation and for amateurs and for venture businesses, Creative Commons helps the amateur revolution, whether it’s about blogging or whether it’s about musical content. And I think that innovation is happening more and more in small companies and less and less in big companies. And I think this is an important thing internationally to continue innovation and build economies.

[00:07:30] David Hornik
I’m here with JD Laszlo of our Media. I’m wondering, jd, why do you support the Creative Commons?

[00:07:38] JD Laszlo
Creative Commons is the best thing that’s happened to the legal foundation in the last several years. I wrote a book called Darken it the Hollywood’s War against the Digital Generation, and I profiled Larry in it. Because copyright law needs to be reformed. And if it’s not going to happen. In Congress, we need to do it ourselves. So people need to find an easy legal way to be able to share all this creative wealth of digital media that’s now starting to explode. And we don’t want all this kind of stuff hung up with these kinds of arcane, restrictive, puzzling kinds of regulations that nobody out there can understand. Creative Comms lets you fine tune your copyright, lets you decide how other people can use your work in a really easy, seamless way. So I really support everything they’re doing. Over there.

[00:08:26] David Hornik
I’m here with Sumir Meghani from Yahoo, who was instrumental in bringing the Creative Commons search to Yahoo. Samir, why are you a supporter of Creative Commons?

[00:08:36] Sumir Meghani
Well, for personal reasons, I think the Creative Commons vision is quite astounding and is very important from a professional perspective. At Yahoo, one of our goals is to enable people to find you, share and expand all human knowledge. And Creative Commons empowers people to take content on the Internet and reuse it in a variety of different ways, something we think is very compelling to making more content available online.

[00:09:04] David Hornik
I’m here with Dave Toole, who’s a trustee of R Media. Dave, why have you gotten involved with Creative Commons?

[00:09:12] Dave Toole
Well, I think it’s a responsibility of people who have the passion and desire to contribute to the Commons. And R Media is really a great community building place for personal media and it’s a great vehicle to bring people together and help them stir it up.

[00:09:28] David Hornik
I’m here with Mitch Kapor. Mitch, why are you a supporter of Creative Commons?

[00:09:36] Mitch Kapor
I think they are providing a whole bunch of really valuable enabling infrastructure. It’s like a Buddhist middle way between the copyright maximalists and the people who think that everything should be free. And by giving tools and kind of a conceptual framework to give some things away and keep other things, they’re really enabling lots of creativity and innovation, letting artists and creative people build on the work of others. So outside the straitjacket, culturally really important. And I’m a big fan of Larry Lessig.

[00:10:16] David Hornik
So there you have it. Just a few of the comments I got while at the Creative Commons party. It was a really fantastic event, got to spend time with some really smart and interesting folks and came to even further appreciate the incredible value from Creative Commons, Commons and all that it has to offer. So my thanks to Larry Lessig and the entire Creative Commons staff for building a great and important organization. Wish you the best as you continue to grow. Thanks much for listening and this has been Venturecast.