Creative Commons

Commoner Letters is a series of letters written by prominent members of the CC community and sent out during our annual fundraising campaign. These exceptional "commoners" write about their past and present projects that involve CC, what CC means to them, why they feel the commons is a vital public resource in our digital age, and where they think CC is headed in the future.

2009 Commoner Letters:

• Mohamed Nanabhay, Head of Online, Al Jazeera English.
• Carl Malamud, founder of Public.Resource.Org.
• Jay Yoon, CC Korea Project Lead.
• Molly Kleinman, Special Assistant to the Dean of Libraries, University of Michigan Library.
• Daniel Zaccagnino and Matthew Siegel, co-Founders, Indaba Music.
• Stephen Friend, President, CEO, and co-Founder, Sage
• Lawrence Lessig, Founder and Board Member, Creative Commons.

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History of the Commoner Letter:

Read the letters at our weblog (RSS).

Link to this archive: http://support.creativecommons.org/letters

The Commoner Letter series started off as the "Lessig Letter" series. In conjunction with the 2005 and 2006 annual fundraising campaigns, Creative Commons' CEO at the time, Lawrence Lessig, wrote a series of letters that discussed CC's origins and explored the direction CC was headed.

In 2007, we revamped the letter series in order to have it better reflect our fast-growing international community, and renamed it Commoner Letters. An archive of all Commoner and Lessig Letters can be found below.

2008 Letters

1. Eben Moglen - Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University, and the founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center.
2. Renata Avila - International Lawyer and Creative Commons Guatemala Project Lead.
3. Jonathan Coulton - Singer and songwriter who licenses all his work under CC licenses.
4. Richard Bookman - Associate Professor of Molecular & Cellular Pharmacology, Miller School of Medicine at University of Miami.
5. Jimmy Wales - Founder of Wikipedia.

2007 Letters

1. Creative Commons @ 5 Years
2. Evan Prodromou
3. Cory Doctorow
4. Beth Kanter
5. Fred Benenson
6. Mike Shaver

2006 Letters

1. (es)

   (it)
   A Report on the Commons
2. (es)

   (it)
   CC Values
3. (es)
   CC & Web 2.0
4. (es)
   CC as a Global Movement
5. (es)
   CC Labs
6. (es)
   CC Changes

2005 Letters

1. Background
1. (es)

   (de)

   (catalan)
   Supporting the Commons
2. (es)

   (de)

   (catalan)
   How it All Began
3. (es)

   (de)
   Interoperability
4. (es)

   (de)
   Fair Use
2. Where we are
1. (es)

   (de)
   Continuing the Movement
2. (es)

   (de)

   (catalan)
   What is Science Commons?
3. (es)

   (de)

   (catalan)
   iCommons
3. Where we're going
1. (es)

   (de)

   (catalan)
   Commercial Licensing
2. (es)

   (de)

   (catalan)
   License Compatibility
3. (es)

   (de)

   (catalan)
   Important Freedoms
4. (es)

   (de)

   (catalan)
   CC Tools
5. (es)

   (de)

   (catalan)
   New Projects
6. (es)

   (de)

   (catalan)
   Final Thoughts

Spanish Translations — Thanks to Maria Cristinia Alvite.
German Translations — Thanks to iRights.info.
Catalan Translations — Thanks to Ignasi Labastida i Juan.