To Hal Abelson, Glenn Otis Brown , Michael Carroll, Catherine Casserly, Caterina Fake, Brian Fitzgerald, Davis Guggenheim, Joi Ito, Lawrence Lessig, Laurie Racine, Eric Saltzman, Annette Thomas, Molly Van Houweling, Jimmy Wales and Esther Wojcicki

Dear all,

After almost a decade using creative commons licenses for the works I create and the last few years working in a business closely related to them, I’ve gone through a great lot of changes regards my opinion of them. I truly admire the job you have done. It is not an easy job by the way, but it has been worth it.

On a very small scale I’ve been curating CC licenses here in Spain, but also in some other countries. I have met some of you in person, and others would love to meet, and for me those moments are like dreams that came true.

But the truth is that besides you all and me, the mission of Creative Commons is on a higher level. It’s way more important than we all intended and the goals CC can reach are beyond our wildest dreams. To create a commons and in fact to change humanity to probably save it from itself.

But believe it or no, we are running out of time.

And that is the reason I, on a personal level, do agree with the statements here reflected: http://freeculture.org/blog/2012/08/27/stop-the-inclusion-of-proprietary-licenses-in-creative-commons-4-0/ much time before I even read about it. And the reason is that I reached quite similar conclusions after thinking a lot about what would be the best license to any work I have created, create and will ever create.

All Rights Reserved, ARR is like a force pushing contents created into a direction that takes them away from people, and we need the very much opposite force to not only counter fight it and there NC and ND play the wrong role. The sooner we expose in a dramatical way all our contents to a situation where they are naked facing the truth, the better to develop and reach those very high goals I was talking about and effectively question the very nature of the monopolistic ARR philosophy.

Thanks a lot for reading this,

Yours sincerely,

Mario Pena