While talking to Jon Mok  (Information Architect at Mindblossom) about finding images under Creative Commons (CC) licenses ( a variety of licenses which allow creative work to be used with limited stipulations) to replace his copyrighted images, in a piece he put together for Nissan Hypercube Contest, I revisited a passion I abandoned after leaving university. That passion is  Open Access (OA)  publishing.

In school I concentrated on furthering the efforts of academic OA, but often researched both sides of creative issue including designs, photos, videos etc. Much like the academic research (though a bit less complicated politically), creative work has been in the centre of a heavily polarized debate on whether everything should be copyrighted or left to influence of public domain and freedom.

While this debate is too lengthy  to tackle in one entry, I found a great example of social media as a venue for a  shift towards a community-centric model with a flexible copyright under Creative Commons License on Flickr. I was surprised at the amount of assets that users were sharing for public use.

Below is a link to check out the Creative Commons page on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

If you are not familiar with the licensing terms Attribution, Nonderivative, Noncommercial, Sharealike, check out the Creative Commons site:

http://creativecommons.org/

It’s a really interesting issue that is relevant to our sphere and most importantly our times. While ideas of open access software and publishing have been around for a long time and are at the root of CC, never has there been so much momentum in proliferation of the initiative. In my opinion it is a combination of technology and new thinking that I am always looking to coin with a sort of umbrella term - ethical, socially inclined, cause-centered, etc.

Well, I may need Karen King’s (Copywriter at Mindblossom)  help finding the term to describe this mentality but CC movement is a worthy of keeping an eye on.