2006 · Open source

Lessig’s “digital prohibition” warning and the rise of Creative Commons

Last reviewed 5 November 2026

At LinuxWorld in August 2006, the law professor Lawrence Lessig told open source developers that copyright law was criminalising a generation of remixers, an “age of prohibition”. His answer was Creative Commons, the licences that now cover billions of works.

The keynote

On 15 August 2006 Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor and the founder of Creative Commons, gave the opening keynote at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. The event also marked fifteen years of Linux. Lessig’s talk, titled “Free Culture: What We Need From You”, was about copyright rather than code, and it ended with a standing ovation.

His argument was that the internet had restored something the 20th century had taken away. For most of history, culture was “read-write”: people retold stories, rewrote songs and built on what they heard. Recorded media and the copyright law built around it created a “read-only” culture, in which a small professional elite produced and everyone else consumed. “Never before had a production been as concentrated and as professionalised,” he said.

An “age of prohibition”

Cheap computers and sites such as YouTube, which was then just over a year old, had brought read-write culture back. Lessig showed the audience remixed music videos built from Japanese anime and satirical montages of George Bush and Tony Blair, made by people with ordinary PCs. “This is digital creativity,” he said. “It’s the creativity that this culture begs for.”

The problem, he argued, was that almost all of it broke copyright law. “The law as currently architected smothers this read write creativity.” Trying to stop it would fail, as alcohol prohibition had in the US in the 1920s, but would turn ordinary young people into lawbreakers: “We can’t kill this, only criminalise it. We can’t force them to become the same couch potatoes that we are. We can only make them pirates.” The report of the speech on vnunet.com ran under the headline that “digital prohibition” inhibits YouTube culture.

Lessig asked the free software community to help. Its members had already shown that sharing could beat a monopoly, he said, and they should build tools and formats, such as free Flash players and the Ogg Vorbis audio format, that kept culture open. “Only you can teach that to those outside of your world. Elsewhere too few of us get it.”

Where Creative Commons came from

Lessig had been making this argument for years. In 1998 the US Copyright Term Extension Act added 20 years to existing copyrights. Lessig represented the online publisher Eric Eldred in a challenge to it, which the Supreme Court rejected in Eldred v. Ashcroft in January 2003.

Creative Commons was the practical response. It was founded in 2001 by Lessig, the MIT computer scientist Hal Abelson and Eldred, and released its first set of licences on 16 December 2002. The idea was to offer a middle ground between “all rights reserved” and giving up copyright entirely: “some rights reserved”. A creator keeps copyright but announces in advance what others may do without asking.

How the licences work

Every Creative Commons licence is built from four elements. BY (attribution) requires credit to the creator and has been part of every licence since version 2.0. SA (ShareAlike) requires adaptations to be shared under the same licence, the copyleft idea borrowed from free software licences such as the GPL. NC (NonCommercial) limits use to non-commercial purposes. ND (NoDerivatives) allows only unchanged copies to be shared.

Combined, they give six standard licences, from the most open, CC BY, to the most restrictive, CC BY-NC-ND. Separately, CC0, released in 2009, lets a creator waive their rights as far as the law allows and place a work as close to the public domain as possible. The current version 4.0 of the licences was released on 25 November 2013 and is designed to work in every country without local versions.

What happened next

Lessig’s argument reached a wider audience through his 2007 TED talk on laws that choke creativity and his 2008 book Remix, which developed the read-write idea. In 2009 Wikipedia moved its text to the CC BY-SA licence, so every edit to the encyclopedia is now shared under Creative Commons terms.

The licences spread across the web. A 2017 report counted more than 415 million CC-licensed photos on Flickr alone, along with millions of works on YouTube, DeviantArt and Wikimedia Commons, and Creative Commons put the total at nearly 2 billion works by 2019. Open educational resources, scientific journals and government data portals adopted them too.

The wider conflict Lessig described did not end. Takedown notices against remixes, the fights over the DMCA’s rules on copy protection, and more recently the question of whether AI models may be trained on openly licensed work all return to his 2006 question: what the law should allow people to do with the culture around them.