Creative Commons. "Monkeyc.net." CC Wiki.

         Monkeyc.net belongs to the former photojournalist John Harvey who now uses Flickr to display his work under a CC license. The case study offers a brief overview of Harvey's activity on Flickr- he started in September, 2004 and currently has almost a thousand photos uploaded. Some of his photos have been featured on the Explore page of Flickr due to his popularity. He uses the CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 generic license. According to Bjorn Bednarek, seeing a former professional photographer willing to use CC licenses is encouraging because it helps to "legitimize and popularize Creative Commons". To Harvey, photography is merely something he enjoys and he is glad to share it with others who would like to include it in their own visions. He writes that "the scope is infinite and it sets the images free in so many ways".

        Monkeyc.net is one of the case studies featured on the Creative Commons website. It is one example of a more specific case in which CC has become popular and the way it is used is online communites. Flickr has become a huge photography site recently and it provides a great outlet for artists who would like to share their work with others. John Harvey is one of those people who shares the sentiment with UbuWeb that "information should be free to all." However, instead of simply circumventing copyright, he has embraced CC licenses and demonstrated how they can offer an effective solution, especially in a community that has quickly become CC based. Again, this source shows yet another model for online communities and how they handle the copyright problem. The commons doesn't seem so much like the vast wasteland many think it will become, but a rich environment of creative works.

Bledsoe, Elliott. "Lessig's Use of Flickr Photos: is Creative Commons Really a Community?" Creative Commons Through the Looking Glass.

          Bledsoe's blog was inspired by a comment Lessig made on his own blog about how, after using a photograph from Flickr in a post, the photographer actually came up to him in Hong Kong. According to Lessig, it was "the most amazing fact of the day". This led Bledsoe to question how, or even if, Creative Commons functions as a community since it relies not only on legal permission but on the idea of sharing and the relationships that sharing facilitates. What makes CC different is that things are not directly shared like they would be in the real world. He compares CC to borrowing a cup of sugar from your neighbor, which involves a direction need and interaction. Using a CC license, however, preempts sharing. Even though someone may not need or want to use the work, permission has been granted anyway without any direction interaction between parties. CC also lacks direct membership which even other online communities have. The point here is that with no central hub and no obvious boundaries in the community, it's actually likely that "members" (those using CC licenses) will feel very isolated. CC then becomes a community only in the fact that it facilitates smaller subcommunities which have come to use it.

        This article emphasizes this idea that Creative Commons facilitates communities and, in turn, the commons. Some of the examples of subcommunities that Bledsoe mentions are Flickr and DeviantArt, places that my project hopes to emphasize as models of the value of the commons online and how Creative Commons plays a role in it. Both of them are made possible, at least in part, but the larger CC community. However, the article points out an important distinction. CC itself is not (at least not yet) a community in the same way that Flickr and DeviantArt are. No one has to sign up or login to use CC licenses. No one discriminates against who can and cannot use these licenses and therefore little is shared among users except for their willingness to share. But smaller communities that embrace CC licenses offer the boundaries and distinctions necessary for a community to really flourish.