Copyright Licensing Organization Gets New Boss; New York Times, 5/14/14

Noam Cohen, New York Times; Copyright Licensing Organization Gets New Boss:

"Creative Commons, whose licensing system encourages the sharing of more than 500 million copyrighted works, on Wednesday appointed a veteran of similar open Internet projects to be its new chief executive.

The new leader, Ryan Merkley, 36, was recently the chief operating officer at the Mozilla Foundation, the organization that supports the open-source Firefox browser, and has also worked with the governments of Toronto and Vancouver...

Creative Commons was founded in 2001 with the idea of making it easier for people to give permission to the public to share or incorporate works under certain conditions — for example, if the new use is noncommercial, or credit is given...

Still, one of the principal challenges for the organization is to keep tabs on its licensees, Mr. Merkley said. The 500 million total “is an estimate, not an actual number,” he said. “It is hard to track them.”

That technical problem, he said, speaks to a larger concern: how to organize Creative Commons content so that the public can easily find and use it in their own projects."