A few months ago, I answered a questionnaire for John Hilton III, who was writing a journal article about motivations for creating Creative Commons-licensed derivative works. He was interested in interviewing me based on the version of Cory Doctorow’s book Content that I marked up for eReader.
Now Hilton has gotten the paper published in First Monday, and here it is. He starts out by explaining what derivative works are, reasons for allowing them to be made from one’s own works, and that the study focuses on derivative works of the sort meant to extend the audience of the original rather than new creative efforts based on it.
Hilton finds that there are two reasons people create derivative works: to make the work more accessible to others (e.g. converting into an audiobook for the blind), and to make the work more useful to oneself (e.g. converting into an eReader file for one’s PDA). The average time spent creating such a work, Hilton says, is 19 hours.
Participants were on the whole glad they had created their derivative works, and had several ideas for encouraging the creation of more such works.
I found this to be a decently-written study, even if the results did not exactly surprise me. It’s good that the Creative Commons is getting more attention.
