Creative Commons, Wikipedia, OER and open access
Once free software proved that commons could be engineered, the model spread from code to culture, education and science within a single decade. This lesson covers four fronts of that expansion — and its martyr.
Creative Commons: a "some rights reserved" for everything
By 2000, default copyright had become automatic, near-eternal (author's life plus seventy years in much of the world) and all-or-nothing: every photograph, essay or song was born locked, even when its author would happily share it. The legal scholar Lawrence Lessig — fresh from losing a Supreme Court challenge to copyright term extension — founded Creative Commons in 2001 with Hal Abelson and Eric Eldred to build the missing middle ground. The first licenses shipped in December 2002.
CC did for creative work what the GPL had done for code: it gave authors a standard, legally solid vocabulary of permissions — attribution (credit me), share-alike (keep derivatives open, copyleft-style), non-commercial, no-derivatives — that anyone can read at a glance. Lessig's book Free Culture (2004) supplied the argument: creativity has always been built on what came before; a copyright system with no breathing room strangles the very inheritance the encyclopedists celebrated. Hundreds of millions of works now carry CC licenses — including Wikipedia, and typically the courses published on Open Knowledge instances, like this one (CC BY-SA 4.0: share and adapt freely, credit the source, keep it open).
Wikipedia: the improbable encyclopedia
Wikipedia's origin story is a lesson in humility about process. In 2000 Jimmy Wales launched Nupedia, a free encyclopedia written by credentialed experts through a seven-step review pipeline. In its first year it approved roughly two dozen articles. As an experiment, in January 2001 Wales and Larry Sanger bolted on a wiki — a website anyone could edit, instantly, no committee — intending it as a mere feeder for drafts. Within a month the wiki had more articles than Nupedia produced in a year; within a decade it was the largest reference work in human history, in hundreds of languages, written almost entirely by pseudonymous volunteers.
The encyclopedists' dream, realized beyond their imagining — and proof of something Ostrom would have recognized: given good rules (verifiability, neutral point of view, cite your sources) and cheap tools for monitoring and repair (page histories, watchlists, reverts), an open commons can outproduce any closed pipeline.
Open education, open science
Education followed. In 2001, MIT faced the question every university faced: how do we sell our courses online? The faculty committee studying the question came back with a different answer: we shouldn't. Selling would compromise what a university is for; the materials should be given away. OpenCourseWare was announced that April — the actual materials of MIT's courses, free to the world — and the practice spread. UNESCO coined the term Open Educational Resources (OER) in 2002, and in 2019 its member states unanimously adopted a formal Recommendation on OER, committing governments worldwide to promote openly licensed learning materials.
Science had the furthest to fall and the hardest fight. By the 1990s, academic publishing had inverted its purpose: researchers did the work (publicly funded), wrote it up (free), reviewed each other (free) — and then bought the results back from journal publishers at subscription prices that rose several times faster than inflation, decade after decade. Even Harvard's library eventually declared the costs untenable. The Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) named the alternative: the internet made it possible for peer-reviewed knowledge to reach "all curious minds" — "an unprecedented public good". Physicists had quietly been living it since 1991 on arXiv, where papers circulate before and alongside journal publication; PLOS and thousands of open-access journals followed; today open access is mandated by research funders across much of the world.
Aaron Swartz
This chapter has a martyr, and his story should be told plainly. Aaron Swartz helped author the RSS 1.0 specification at fourteen, helped build Creative Commons' technical infrastructure as a teenager, and spent his short adult life treating access to knowledge as a moral cause. He liberated millions of pages of US court records from a pay-per-page government system. In his 2008 Guerilla Open Access Manifesto he wrote that "information is power" and that sharing locked-up scientific knowledge was "a moral imperative".
In 2010–11 he used MIT's network to mass-download some 4.8 million articles from the JSTOR academic archive. JSTOR itself declined to press charges; federal prosecutors charged him anyway, under an elastic computer-fraud statute, with felonies carrying decades of theoretical prison time, and pressed him toward a plea. In January 2013, aged twenty-six, he took his own life. JSTOR now provides substantial free public access; his case remains the starkest reminder that open access to knowledge is not an abstract debate, and that the line between "criminal" and "founder of the next commons" can be drawn by nothing more than timing and power.
By the 2010s, the pattern our earlier lessons traced — gift, institution, commons — existed for every kind of knowledge. What remained was to make publishing a curated library as easy as benefiting from one.