Or Die Trying executive producers Sarah Hawkins and Myah Hollis caught up with Jane Park of Creative Commons to talk about licensing, collaboration, and fostering community between content creators through user-generated platforms.
Jane Park: Orange County, California. I’m currently based in Los Angeles. I’ve also lived in the Bay Area and New York City, and lots of travel sprinkled throughout.
ODT: Tell us about your role at Creative Commons and your work with Peer 2 Peer University! How can filmmakers get involved?
JP: I lead Creative Commons’ work with user-generated content platforms, like Wikipedia, Medium, and Unsplash. In addition to baking in CC licenses as options for creators like filmmakers (note both YouTube and Vimeo have CC licenses available), I work with our platform partners to explore better ways to enable collaboration and creativity, in addition to surfacing some of these impacts in our annual State of the Commons report.
From 2009-2012 I volunteered as a course instructor and strategy consultant for the Peer 2 Peer University, an experimental education initiative that organized learning into peer groups online. I’ve designed and facilitated courses on everything from creative writing to CC licensing for newbies and educators.
Filmmakers should start with learning about how CC licenses apply to content generally, check out our beta CC search for content they might use creatively in their own works, and get in touch about films and other video projects they end up licensing with CC!
ODT: How do you as professional in a creative career juggle the work/life balance?
JP: I’m pretty blessed in that sense, as Creative Commons is a great place to work WRT work/life balance. We’re a virtual organization, with most of our staff distributed in various cities across North America. We keep each other accountable and connected via a variety of communications mediums, including Slack and Google hangout, while allowing each other the flexibility and agency to do thoughtful and creative work. It’s definitely a challenge not seeing each other F2F regularly, but we do have intense weeks of F2F meetings several times throughout the year to make up for it. As for life alignment, CC stands for inclusivity, diversity, collaboration, and creativity -- all things that I aim for within my public and private spheres, so it feels like a natural extension of my personal goals.
ODT: Legalities and licensing are often things that scare artists, but ultimately can help protect their work and those involved in their projects. Why should filmmakers embrace Creative Commons?
JP: Creative Commons licenses have allowed an entire universe of content (1.2 billion works!) to spring up on the web that would otherwise be locked down under “all rights reserved” copyright. This content is diverse and wide-ranging -- from feature-length films to YouTube videos, 3D designs to university courseware, scientific data to funny cat photos. Most anything that is copyrightable is also CC licenseable, which means that filmmakers have access to all this content to learn from and incorporate into their own creative projects. CC licensed content is also a starting point for more deeper collaborations, such as finding the graphic designer or writer you need, and many other creative minds. Meeting on a platform that has CC content means that you are both coming to the table open to collaboration, since the essence of a CC license invites collaboration through the medium that is your work.
ODT: How can artists most benefit from using this collaborative community?
JP: I think the best thing creators can do now is to tell us and their communities when they are using a CC licensed work or licensing their own works under CC. So much stuff is being reused out there, and we’re only really reporting the tip of the iceberg in each domain when it comes to collaboration around open content. We’d love to surface more uses, and start to weave these profiles together into the larger story of how the internet, access to information, and tools like CC have enabled the evolution of human collaboration online.
ODT: Any cool examples of filmmakers who have used Creative Commons?
JP: I’m a fan of Vincent Moon, who licenses most, if not all, of his music videos under Creative Commons. He’s done this video series in the past called the Take Away Shows, which inspired my Peer 2 Peer University course on creative writing. You can check out his full body of work here.
We also profiled CC-licensed short film, “Alike,” in our just-released State of the Commons report ” which won numerous awards and was created using Blender, a free and open source 3D creation suite. The Blender Institute itself has licensed many of its films and their assets under CC as well. Last year, Netflix released a short film called Meridian to the public under CC, so that developers might help make the open source standard Interoperable Master Format (IMF) more usable across the web.
But I’m sure there are more video makers out there who use CC than we know about, so I’d love to turn this question back on your audience and invite them to tell us about cool videos they know of that have incorporated CC content, been licensed with CC, or should be licensed with CC! The different ways you can plug into our community are listed here: https://creativecommons.org/about/get-involved/.
ODT: What inspires you most?
JP: Collaborative experiences with people, including simple conversations, that lead to the emergence of new perspectives, ideas, and ways of being.
ODT: What dream(s) are you most fighting for?
JP: This is a tough one. Currently I feel like I’m fighting to maintain the status quo, or forward momentum of progress I thought I saw in the last decade, rather than fighting for unfulfilled dreams. I guess maybe at the root of all that though is the freedom and capacity to have dreams that extend into others’ dreams, to feel like one has a say in how to engage with and inspire one’s own communities. So it’s less about an idea, and more about people. If there’s no one on the other side of a dream, then it’s not one I could likely fight for, even if I wanted to.
