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The internet is this great, organizing force,
brings with it a lot of power and a lot of opportunity.
The internet was encouraging a wide range of people
to create and to share their creativity.
The internet revolutionized the way
that we experience and interact with artistic work.
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The internet's incredible ability
to align people with similar interests
makes it very possible for normal people
to make big things happen, and that's
something that wasn't possible at any other time.
We wanted to have a space that was devoted
for people to explore creativity,
to indulge those sorts of ideas that everyday life make really
difficult to follow through on.
The hard stuff about art is to fund it
and to find an audience, and here you
get to do both right from the beginning.
We see Kickstarter as being a medium that is very distinct.
It is something where the backers of a project
will benefit from its success just as much as its creator.
It's something that's probably driven
more by creative expression than some sort
of commercial interest, so I think for a creator
it has very little risk.
It's a great way to mitigate a lot of the challenging
things about art.
Kickstarter projects have not just
found support from audiences on the internet,
but they've also found support in the real world.
We've had projects get book deals,
land in the Whitney Museum, get Oscar nominations.
10% of the films that got into Sundance this year
were Kickstarter funded.
Over 10% of the films that got into South by Southwest
this year were Kickstarter funded.
So we're seeing over and over that the products that
find support, they're not just these novelty things that
manage to find love from the Internet.
They're things that have gone on to have real significance
in the greater world.
There's a project called Double Fine,
which is by a game developer named Tim Schafer.
Tim is a legendary guy.
He's made a lot of games that people have really loved.
He's also been the guy that's always
been on the margins of the video game industry.
Even he has a hard time getting things he wants made.
And so rather fight against the system
as he's done over and over and over, here he
took the opportunity to go straight to his fans
and give them a chance to make a game with him,
and that raised $1 million in its first 24 hours.
It's the kind of thing that I think showed a lot of people
the amount of power and authority
they have with their audiences, and it's going
to lead to a lot more like it.
And so at this moment, with the internet being what it is,
this idea of people contributing to the arts in this kind of way
is really able to take hold and flourish in a way
that it never had the chance to do before.
We had a regime of copyright, and the internet
completely flipped the technical foundation
upon which that regime had been built.
Creative Commons is just a nonprofit corporation,
and we're committed to only one thing,
to make it simple for artists to choose the freedoms they
want their creativity to carry.
Copyright law has always been about I create a work.
I don't want it released or used or exploited in any way
that I don't control.
Fine.
Now, shift to the digital world.
There's kids taking some video images
and posting it on YouTube.
They don't care what you do with the work.
Or academics who write articles, and they
want other people to copy and distribute their articles.
I don't care what you do with my work.
I just want my work out there.
So people have come to recognize that this
isn't a simple black and white are you
for copyright or against it.
They begin to recognize the space between black and white
that Creative Commons is trying to occupy.
So what we did is built a series of free, copyright licenses.
You can say take this work and share it,
do whatever you want with it, but you
have to give me attribution.
Or like Wikipedia uses our Attribution ShareAlike licence.
What that means is take it, exploit it commercially, modify
it, but if you modify it, you have
to release your modification under the same free license.
Or we have a noncommercial licence which basically
says take it, share it, do what you want with it,
but if you want to commercially exploit this,
then you need to talk to me about getting permission.
These are basic ways to try to divide the world between those
who need and depend upon their copyright
and those who are just creating for the love
of their creativity and not for the money.
If you think about the value that
has been added to the internet by people voluntarily
creating and sharing creativity, it is huge.
Now it's amazing to see that artists
through new technologies are able to embrace the internet
and actually use it as a tool to create artworks
and artistic experiences.
One of the challenges is how do you showcase those works?
How does it continue to live online and have a long term
life that would be similar to a physical work?
One first step in that experiment was Chris Milk.
Chris Milk is a film director.
He has collaborated with Arcade Fire on a number of projects.
He developed a physical installation idea
for Arcade Fire.
Balls would draw drop at the end of their set.
They'd have LEDs in them.
They'd be synced to go with the crowd.
But then what the challenge is, how do you
bring that back online?
So we created a site and a call for people
who actually got those balls to submit
their photos and their stories, and it
was so crazy to see the stories that came in about that.
When you extend the life of a physical project on the web
and give people the ability to be remix that media,
they'll do some really inventive stuff with it.
For the Marina Abramovic show specifically, the MoMA
was putting out portraits of all the people
who sat with Marina on Flickr, and so just
releasing those images struck a chord with the online community
and people started remixing it.
And this wasn't the intention when they put that out.
And I think The Artist Is Present
video game is sort of an extension
of her physical projects on the web.
Rafael Rozendaal makes works that
are for an online consumption.
He started the interesting process
of actually creating individual domain names that are sold.
And so they exist as one work of art.
That is, kind of framed by the domain the way
that might frame a painting.
The internet is forcing us to broaden
what an artistic studio should look like
and what an artist themselves, what their language, should be
and what language we need to use to talk about them.
My creative utopia is that we have a huge proportion of all
of us creating all the time.
There is no preconcept whatsoever
to the kinds of things that could be made,
and I think that's a very powerful opportunity.
You know, I think you can hopefully
start to see radical jumps through this sharing
of research and knowledge and see
how quickly things progress.
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