Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig talks about how changes in intellectual property rights over the last hundred years have served to strangle both free speech and creativity, and how new media technologies are breaking this stranglehold.

Lessig is a founding board member of Creative Commons, a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build on and share. To that end it has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons licenses. These licenses allow creators to offer a range of different, less restrictive rights which, for example, allow non-commercial reproduction with or without attribution.

So what has this got to do with International Development? Well, I believe that a more widespread adoption of the type of open rights promoted by Creative Commons would significantly improve the efficacy of much development communication, for both raising awareness and use ‘in the field’.

As most people are aware, we’re witness to a huge shift in the way we communicate. Older ‘read only’ media platforms are being replaced by the ‘read/write’ web. Participatory culture and the social graph are changing the way we create and consume content. Organisations, from brands to governments are now part of wide social conversations. Traditional advertising and marketing communications is much less effective at reaching audiences more interested in the Internet than the TV. People are now able to create, discuss and share information amongst themselves.

Which is where content comes in. One of the major activities on social sites like Facebook and Twitter is consume and share content. And it’s the sharing that’s important, because if content isn’t spreadable and embeddable then it’s not doing its job. More and more often content is consumed in a social context -- copyrighted pictures sitting on an organisation’s website are nowhere near as ‘viral’ as the same set released with a non-commercial attribution license on the social networks.

It’s important to understand that Creative Commons is not an attack on copyright holders. I believe that those working in international development should be spending more on content: sending out and training up more photographers, film makers and writers to create content, empowering their own staff as well as their clients to tell their stories, spread their messages. And I believe this is most effectively achieved if the content is more freely available, in order to better spread the message on social networks and blogs.

Take the Creative Commons non-commercial attribution license. Broadly speaking this says you can reproduce the content if you’re a non-commercial enterprise and as long as you clearly attribute the originator. A license like this allows a blogger to amplify and spread the message using your content, e.g. some great photographs, to add value to their blog.

This all implies a pretty radical shift in thinking for many involved in international development communications. Inertia and a lack of clear knowlege about the details of Creative Commons has hampered uptake. However, things are changing rapidly, and there are big prizes for those organisations that embrace content and more open forms of content licensing as the most of effective way to spread their messages.

Those that don’t embrace this type of change, risk being left behind, clinging to an increasingly dated communications model that simply doesn’t work any more.

However, while I believe that there’s clear value in bringing together this public-facing, awareness-raising communication material, we (the founders of this site) also want to do something similar for international development communications that are used ‘in the field’ – e.g. radio scripts, posters, mobile text messages used in health campaigns.

Unfortunately, almost none of this material is available in the public domain. (Benjamin explains more about this in a post about his personal experience of developing health campaigns for radio broadcast in Ethiopia.)

We believe that all Government funded international development communications should be available in a central, easily accessible database under Creative Commons licenses. A database where photographs, posters, scripts, public information leaflets, etc, can be downloaded, copied, translated and adapted for local audiences, saving practitioners time and money and therefore ultimately saving lives.

In an age where we recycle many of our physical objects, it seems strange that most of the international development communications work funded by Governments, IGOs and even NGOs is completely lost after the short campaigns they promote.

We believe that a few simple changes will have real and immediate impact on the way the international development community communicates. All it really requires is a change of attitude from Government, a simple addition to all relevant contracts which obliges the supplier to make any communications work they produce as part of a funded project, e.g. photos, text, video, available under an appropriate Creative Commons license on a central database.

(Incidentally, we’re not saying that they should do less communication work, we just think that we should be getting more mileage out of the money spent. Running more campaigns without having to ‘reinvent the wheel’ each time. Using more content to help educate and promote their work.)

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