Another reason why I think 2009 is the year of "Creative Commons"

From the Creative Commons blog (12 Feb 09):
YouTube Tests Download and Creative Commons License Options

YouTube just made an incredibly exciting announcement: it’s testing an option that gives video owners the ability to allow downloads and share their work under Creative Commons licenses. The test is being launched with a handful of partners, including Stanford, Duke, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UCTV.

More from the YouTube blog post:

Many video creators on YouTube want their work to be seen far and wide. They don't mind sharing their work, provided that they get the proper credit. Using Creative Commons licenses, we're giving our partners and community more choices to make that happen. Creative Commons licenses permit people to reuse downloaded content under certain conditions.

We're also testing an option that gives video owners the ability to permit downloading of their videos from YouTube. Partners could choose to offer their video downloads for free or for a small fee paid through Google Checkout. Partners can set prices and decide which license they want to attach to the downloaded video files (for more info on the types of licenses, take a look here).

I've mentioned how I feel Creative Commons is "the next big thing round the corner". I was talking about music but so far the signs say to me 2009 is going to be the year of CC, period.

For one thing, I feel that social media development has been characterised by the introduction and adoption of "tools" and "platforms" in the last four to five years. By tools and platforms, I mean Blogs, services like Flickr and YouTube.

Now that these social media tools and services have gained mainstream awareness and use, my hunch is that the next "social media wave" will come from the creative aspects.

Creative Commons has been around for several years but it's not really received widespread attention in Singapore, at least that's my sense.

A sign of "widespread use" would be more Singapore-based bloggers/ photographters/ musicians adopting and displaying the CC license prominently (if you think I'm missing out on something, I'd be happy to be corrected).

There are promising signs though.

Like the revamped Yesterday.sg site.


Scroll all the way down.

They've adopted a CC license.


To my knowledge, they are the first (and so far the only) government agency related initiative that has adopted a CC license.

I've discussed with a few people about a possible CC-Singapore Contest. What they pointed out rightly was that its hard promote CC as a concept itself. More feasible to start with things that people are familiar with, like "Photography Contest" with CC as context.

Music remains at the top of my mind though. Partly fueled by personal interest and also by example like Nine Inch Nails' CC-licensed Grammy nominated album .

I plan to put a case to my NLB colleagues to adopt CC license(s) for public library materials that we're already putting online, and where we hope to achieve widespread dissemination.

We'll see.