We want to write a book about the ways creators and businesses make
money to sustain what they do when they give away their work for free
under Creative Commons licenses. We’re funding the project through Kickstarter.
The book will be freely available to everyone. We think it’s an
inspiring and important project and hope you’ll help us by backing it
with a contribution.
Many creators and businesses look at the digital landscape and decide
not to fight the current. Rather than trying to control copying of
their work, they seek business models that involve sharing and reuse.
Some choose business models built upon openly-licensed content, made
with Creative Commons.
As we teeter on the brink of reaching 1 billion CC-licensed works
online, we know there are plenty of creators, businesses, and
organizations building things around open content. Some are producing
original content under open licenses. Others are building on existing
open content to make new things, provide new services, and host new
platforms. Some of the strategies in these business models – like
sharing your work early and often to grow an audience – are
well-documented in must-read books for artists and writers, like Information Doesn’t Want to be Free by Cory Doctorow and Show Your Work! by
Austin Kleon. But we don’t yet have a full picture of the options for
those who want to try ventures of all types building on open.
With this project, we want to fill that gap. We will document 24
successful open business models around the world and write a book about
how they work. We don’t want to profile unicorns. We’re going to spend a
year picking apart these business models to reveal the ways they can be
reused and remixed by others. A major component of that is determining
what won’t work for others or what particular stars had to align to make
something work in a given situation.
