For many of us, Creative Commons was conceived of as a second- best solution created by private agreement because the best solution could not be obtained through public law. The best solution would be a return of the formality requirement—a requirement that one at least write the words "James Boyle copyright 2008," for example, in order to get more than 100 years of legal protection backed by "strict liability" and federal criminal law. Those who did not wish to have the legal monopoly could omit the phrase and the work would pass into the public domain, with a period of time during which the author could claim copyright retrospectively if the phrase was omitted by accident. The default position would become freedom and the dead weight losses caused by giving legal monopolies to those who had not asked for them, and did not want them, would disappear. To return to the words of Justice Brandeis that I quoted at the beginning of the book: 12
The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions—knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas—become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use. Upon these incorporeal productions the attribute of property is continued after such communication only in certain classes of cases where public policy has seemed to demand it. 13
Brandeis echoes the Jeffersonian preference for a norm of freedom, with narrowly constrained exceptions only when necessary. That preference means that the commons of which I spoke is a relatively large one—property rights are the exception, not the norm. Of course, many of those who use Creative Commons licenses might disagree with that policy preference and with every idea in this book. They may worship the DMCA or just want a way to get their song or their article out there while retaining some measure of control. That does not matter. The licenses are agnostic. Like a land trust which has a local pro-growth industrialist and a local environmentalist on its board, they permit us to come to a restricted agreement on goals ("make sure this space is available to the public") even when underlying ideologies differ. They do this using those most conservative of tools—property rights and licenses. And yet, if our vision of property is "sole and despotic dominion," these licenses have created something very different—a commons has been made out of private and exclusive rights. 14
My point here is that Creative Commons licenses or the tools of free and open source software—to which I will turn in a moment—represent something more than merely a second-best solution to a poorly chosen rule. They represent a visible example of a type of creativity, of innovation, which has been around for a very long time, but which has reached new salience on the Internet—distributed creativity based around a shared commons of material. 15
FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE 16
In 2007, Clay Shirky, an incisive commentator on networked culture, gave a speech which anyone but a Net aficionado might have found simultaneously romantic and impenetrable. He started by telling the story of a Shinto shrine that has been painstakingly rebuilt to exactly the same plan many times over its 1,300-year life—and which was denied certification as a historic building as a result. Shirky's point? What was remarkable was not the building. It was a community that would continue to build and rebuild the thing for more than a millennium. 17
From there, Shirky shifted to a discussion of his attempt to get AT&T to adopt the high-level programming language Perl—which is released as free and open source software under the General Public License. From its initial creation by Larry Wall in 1987, Perl has been adapted, modified, and developed by an extraordinary range of talented programmers, becoming more powerful and flexible in the process. As Shirky recounts the story, when the AT&T representatives asked "where do you get your support?" Shirky responded, " 'we get our support from a community'—which to them sounded a bit like 'we get our Thursdays from a banana.' " Shirky concluded the speech thus: 18
We have always loved one another. We're human. It's something we're good at. But up until recently, the radius and half-life of that affection has been quite limited. With love alone, you can plan a birthday party. Add coordinating tools and you can write an operating system. In the past, we would do little things for love, but big things required money. Now we can do big things for love.1
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There are a few people out there for whom "operating systems" and "love" could plausibly coexist in a sentence not constructed by an infinite number of monkeys. For most though, the question is, what could he possibly have meant? 20