Sometime today, the number of photos posted to Flickr under a Creative Commons license hit 50 million.

Here’s an updated graph of Creative Commons photo growth on Flickr.

Download tab delimited data

Previous related blog posts: one, two, three

In previous blog posts, I’ve documented the number of photos on Flickr which were released under a Creative Commons license (post one, post two). For the past year, I’ve grabbed the Flickr Creative Commons page nightly, which lists how many photos are available under each license.

The total number today is over 32 million which is just incredible. A few days ago, I compiled all the data and graphed the growth. Click the graph for a larger version.

Once I had cleaned the data up, I uploaded the data to Swivel.com to see if it could produce nicer graphs than Excel. Turns out it didn’t. In fact, I found the interface confusing… it automatically created graphs for each individual column (license) and then created a combined graph based on percentage which made no sense. I ended up ditching Swivel, not really realizing uploaded swivel data can be remixed easily by other users.

Then things sort of took off on their own… which is both amazing and frustrating at the same time. Brian Mulloy, the CEO and Co-founder of Swivel, created a useful graph of the data on Swivel (much like the one I made above). That got a bunch of views on Swivel… and the graph ended up on the front page of the Creative Commons website. It goes to show you just how incredible collaboration among people on the Internet is. Even when you don’t intend to participate in collaboration it still happens. Next time, I’ll get my act together and actually blog about what I’m up to before my data starts to spread.

Here’s the data in tab delimited form. And here it is on Google Spreadsheet. Spread it freely.

Update: I just noticed that the collaborative path this data took was blogged on the Swivel blog as well.

On Howard Stern’s first show on Sirius, he tells a story that his friend recently gave him a DVD of a film that was still in theaters.  It made him feel “special”.  It turned out his friend rips so many movies, that he gave him the wrong disc.  An interesting story of blatant copyright infringement from someone making a living from subscribers paying for his content.

On another note, definitely check out Lessig’s presentation on his view of the Google Print project and Fair Use.  I’m still not convinced the old school copyright law cleanly meets the needs in a world where infinite digital copies can be made for almost nothing.  (speaking of which, the file is distributed via Bittorrent and Lessig says 99% of the bandwidth was provided by the bittorrent clients.)

Last Thursday the New York Public Library held a debate titled, “The Battle Over Books“. It was video webcast live, unfortunately they screwed up and forget to disable the password protection on the stream, so you couldn’t get in until the end. They now have an audio only quicktime stream on the website. Or you can download here via bittorrent.

The participants included:

• Allan Alder - Association of American Publishers
• David Drummond - Google
• Lawrence Lessig - Stanford Law School and Creative Commons
• Nick Taylor - The Authors Guild

While it is an entertaining listen (once the NYPL guy at the beginning shuts up) it is at the same time very frustrating. The majority of the debate hovers above the issue that the opposing sides disagree on the terms of Fair Use. Is copying an entire book, putting it in a database fair use? Alder and Taylor say no, Drummond and Lessig say yes.

However, while terms of Fair Use is a big issue, it becomes clear from the debate that the fundamental issue is that Copyright law is broken. It may have worked alright with the protection of physical objects, but it does not map cleanly to the digital world. Lessig alludes to this on multiple occasions and outside the debate has at least attempted to suggest alternative solutions.

Analog Hole

Audio and video of the April 14 debate at Cornell about copyright (with respect to music and movies) is now available via Bittorrent. Cornell also has a video in Real format here.

The discussion includes:

• Alec French, Senior counsel, Government Relations, NBC/Universal
• Cary Sherman, President, Recording Industry Association of America
• Avery Kotler, Senior director, Business and Legal Affairs Napster
• Fred von Lohmann, Senior staff attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor of Communications, NYU
• Fritz Attaway, Executive VP and general counsel, Motion Picture Association of America

It is long but entertaining. They go around and around, never really listen to each other, never budge an inch. The Music/Movie industry makes one thing clear, Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) is here to stay. The great piece of the industries placing such tight restrictions on this content is that the Creative Commons movement probably wouldn’t have happened. DRM may not be such a bad thing after all.