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Creative Commons Hires CEO, Expands
by Sarah Lai Stirland
In 2001, when a group of law professors and their students launched the Creative Commons, a nonprofit project aimed at providing a new way to license creative works on the Internet, some observers in the artistic community privately doubted whether the effort would succeed.
Instead of giving creators total control over how their works are used, the group sought to provide boilerplate terms that give consumers more flexibility in re-using creative works online. Some people predicted that few in the artistic community would be interested in using the terms. The Economist magazine cast doubt on the project, saying that while "the service sounds intriguing, it is not clear how many individual creators will bother using it."
Millions of licensed Web pages and several projects later, those doubters may have to admit they were wrong. Hundreds of writers, musicians, photographers and others have used Creative Commons to experiment with ways to publicize their works and ideas on the Internet. And Wired magazine has produced a compact disc of music from artists such as the Beastie Boys, David Byrne and Brazilian culture minister Gilberto Gil that uses Creative Commons' sampling licenses.
To manage the growth of their organization, the founders of Creative Commons have hired a new CEO and an executive director for Science Commons, a new arm of the organization.
Mark Resch, Creative Commons' new CEO, said his job will be to build on the organization's initial success by spreading awareness of the licenses and encouraging more people to adopt them. Among the ideas he would like to pursue would be to persuade mobile device makers, such as the makers of camera phones, to incorporate the licenses into their software so people could label the content they create with Creative Commons licenses.
Resch, founder and chairman of the art and technology exhibit design firm Onomy Labs in Menlo Park, Calif., has long been interested in seeing how art, technology and commerce can mix. He said he was interested in working for Creative Commons because it will provide him with the opportunity to further pursue those issues.
"Creative Commons is important because it's not just about social success, [and] it's not just a bunch of idealist lawyers tilting at windmills," he said.
Instead, the project recognizes the need for commerce to flourish while also protecting the public's interest and updating the nation's intellectual property legal structure to make the process of sharing and using information more efficient. "Ideally we'd like a balance of business and social success," Resch said.
In addition to founding Onomy Labs, Resch co-founded and worked as vice president of operations at Luna Imaging, a digital-imaging firm. In that job, he worked with the Getty Trust and Eastman Kodak in the late 1980s to create databases of photographs of the trust's artwork so that artwork would be available for educational purposes.
During a stint at Xerox, Resch worked on a project to manage digital rights and expression that was spun off as a joint venture with Microsoft as ContentGuard. He also worked as president and CEO of CommerceNet, a nonprofit research consortium in Silicon Valley that explores the strategic use of information technology to foster e-commerce.
Another key hire for Creative Commons is John Wilbanks, who is taking on the new role of executive director of the Science Commons project. The project, which is scheduled to launch in January, is aimed at helping members of the scientific community make more research information widely available.
"Right now, there is some unnecessary legal and technical friction that makes it hard for people to publish online," Wilbanks said.
Science Commons will help authors self-publish their research online and assist scientists in publishing results that normally would not be published in existing scientific journals but still could provide useful information. Science Commons also is talking to universities and publishers about making more journal articles freely available online.
Wilbanks' professional life has focused on making scientific knowledge more useful and electronically accessible. He joined Creative Commons after serving a research fellowship at the World Wide Web Consortium, where he worked with the pharmaceutical and life sciences communities on semantic Web standards for those communities. Before that, he founded and sold a bioinformatics company called Incellico.
Both Wilbanks and Resch started working at Creative Commons at the beginning of November. Wilbanks will be based in Boston, and Resch will work in San Francisco, where Creative Commons is located.
Veteran Science Committee Aide Retires
In other science-related news, Bob Palmer, the long-time Democratic staff director for the House Science Committee, announced last week that he is retiring at the end of the year after spending 25 years working on Capitol Hill. Palmer was not available to discuss his post-retirement plans.
Chuck Atkins, who currently serves as chief of staff to committee ranking Democrat Bart Gordon of Tennessee, will succeed Palmer as minority staff director. Atkins has worked for eight members of the Science Committee.
AeA Hires Director Of Trade Regulation
The technology industry trade association AeA has found a successor for AnnMarie Treglia, its director of international trade regulation.
Treglia left earlier this year to return to her home state of Michigan. Her replacement is Kenneth Montgomery, who joined the organization in late October.
Montgomery will focus on policy analysis and lobbying lawmakers on customs and export-control issues. He is a licensed U.S. customs broker and has worked on trade issues for more than 15 years. Before joining AeA, Montgomery ran his own consulting company, which provided clients with advice on customs and trade compliance, and corporate training and development.
From 2001 to 2003, Montgomery worked for Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, Calif., on trade and customs compliance. He also has worked on trade issues for the Amdahl, IBM, Incyte and Watkins-Johnson.
At the FCC, meanwhile, Jeffrey Carlisle, the agency's Wireline Competition Bureau chief, announced earlier this week that he has promoted Diane Griffin to become the bureau's associate chief and chief of staff. Griffin has been the bureau's assistant bureau chief since October 2001.
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