IT Commandment: Thou shalt free thy content

The ZDNet bloggers are doing a series of IT commandments, so I thought I'd join in the fun. I racked my brain trying to think of a 'commandment' that suited my blog's theme of Web 2.0. What I came up with is essentially one of the building blocks of the social Web, Creative Commons. Rather than 'free your content', a more practical way to put it is: use licenses with as few restrictions as possible. But that doesn't sound as catchy as 'Thou shalt free thy content' :-)

To illustrate the point I will use backstage.bbc.co.uk, which is the BBC's developer network. On Backstage the BBC makes content feeds available for people to build services with, on a non-commercial basis. While the BBC puts restrictions on the feeds, at least they are opening up their huge content platform for developers to build on. We'll see a lot more of this from media companies in the near future.

Indeed the BBC is the early adopter of the media industry in regard to Web technologies, as evidenced recently at Microsoft's Mix 06 event - where the BBC outlined plans for online on-demand TV and radio.

Creative Commons is all about enabling sharing of information, which is the raison d'etre of BBC BackstageGetting back to freeing thy content. Content copyright has been a contentious topic on the Web almost from its inception, precisely because the Web's read/write nature makes it so easy to copy content and re-use it. And with relatively new content syndication formats such as RSS essentially automating a lot of content re-use, there is no sign of the controversy abiding any time soon.

However there has been one shining light over the past few years and it is called Creative Commons, founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig. The first set of Creative Commons licenses was published in December 2002 and it immediately gained a large take-up, particularly from bloggers. Simply put, Creative Commons is a much more flexible copyright framework, designed for the digital world rather than the analog one that traditional copyright was designed for. As the Wikipedia defined Creative Commons:

"The Creative Commons website enables copyright holders to grant some of their rights to the public while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes including dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information."

Creative Commons is all about enabling sharing of information, which is the raison d'etre of BBC Backstage.

But wait, there's more! The BBC went even further with the 'thou shalt free thy content' commandment, by announcing its intention to license some of its digitized programming content under a Creative Commons license. Called the Creative Archive, it started by releasing clips of BBC factual programmes from bbc.co.uk - for use by British citizens only (determined by IP address). As with the backstage initiative, it is so far restricted to non-commercial use.

In summary, there's room for expansion in both the range of content the BBC releases and what they allow people to do with it. But in 2006 this is a good example of a company opening up their content via the Creative Commons. Because who knows what people will create using that content as a base?

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Our IT Commandments:

1. Thou shalt not outsource mission critical functions
2. Thou shalt not pretend
3. Thou shalt honor and empower thy (Unix) sysadmins
4. Thou shalt leave the ideology to someone else
5. Thou shalt not condemn departments doing their own IT
6. Thou shalt put thy users first, above all else
7. Thou shalt give something back to the community
8. Thou shalt not use nonsecure protocols on thy network
9. Thou shalt free thy content
10. Thou shalt not ignore security risks when choosing platforms
11. Thou shalt not fear change
12. Thou shalt document all thy works
13. Thou shalt loosely couple