Joi Ito: ‘Creative Commons is a solution for failed sharing’ | Technology | The Guardian « Things that move my mind

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Creative Commons chief executive Joi Ito. Photograph: Alicia Canter

If you want to be successful on the internet , first get big. That’s the guiding principle that Joi Ito (his first name is actually Joichi, but he offers “Joey” as the pronunciation) suggests companies live by. And as he’s been an investor in the photo-sharing site Flickr, the music-community site last.fm, and indirectly in the microblogging network Twitter, he probably has a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. And he thinks he knows what will work, in terms of a business model, for Twitter – a topic we’ll return to.

Ito, 43, wears many hats: he has been a DJ and nightclub owner, but is also on the board of the Mozilla Foundation (which produces Firefox), the blogging platform Six Apart , and runs his own venture capital company, as well as sitting on the board of a number of internet companies and organisations.

Creative licence

He was in London last week mainly in his role as the chief executive of Creative Commons , the non-profit organisation that oversees the creation and evangelisation of the licensing scheme used by (among others) the White House, the film director Ridley Scott and the musician Trent Reznor – though most famously of course through Flickr, and most recently Wikipedia, which in June put all its content under a Creative Commons licence .

“I’m here talking to people about Creative Commons, more listening than talking,” he explains. “I’m trying to understand what the issues are here, what people are thinking about, trying to understand what we need to do, and what we can do to help.” (One way they could help would be to fund it: when I ask how Creative Commons gets its funding, he replies “I beg,” and chuckles.) ...

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http://reiska.wordpress.com/2009/09/27/joi-ito-creative-commons-is-a-solution-for-failed-sharing-technology-the-guardian/

http://reiska.wordpress.com/2009/09/27/joi-ito-creative-commons-is-a-solution-for-failed-sharing-technology-the-guardian/