Joichi Ito

Director, MIT Media Lab, Boston, USA

Media Lab director Joi Ito is a leading thinker and writer on innovation, global technology policy, and the role of the Internet in transforming society in substantial and positive ways. A vocal advocate of emergent democracy, privacy, and Internet freedom, Ito is board chair (and former CEO) of Creative Commons, and sits on the boards of the Mozilla Foundation, WITNESS, and Global Voices.

In Japan, he was a founder of Digital Garage, and helped establish and later became CEO of the country’s first commercial Internet service provider. He was an early investor in more than 40 companies, including Flickr, Six Apart, Last.fm, Kongregate, Kickstarter, and Twitter. Ito’s honors include TIME magazine’s “Cyber-Elite” listing in 1997 (at age 31) and selection as one of the “Global Leaders for Tomorrow” by the World Economic Forum (2001).

In 2008, BusinessWeek named him one of the “25 Most Influential People on the Web.” In 2011, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oxford Internet Institute. In 2012, he was named to the board of directors of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

by Joichi Ito

Joi talks about the explosion of innovation around the Internet is driven by an ecosystem of people who work in an open network defined by open standards. However, Joi stresses the fact that the technical ability to connect in an increasingly seamless way has begun to highlight friction and failure in the system caused by the complicated copyright system that was originally designed to “protect” innovation. Just as open network protocols created an interoperable and frictionless network, open metadata and legal standards can solve many of the issues caused by copyright and dramatically reduce the friction and cost that it currently represents.

The article further mentions that the open standards and the small pieces loosely joined had created an ecosystem of components and networks that dramatically lowered the cost of development, collaboration and delivery. This allowed people to innovate, launch, fail, connect, mashup and remix in such an efficient way and at such low cost, that the center of innovation moved from the research laboratories of the giant companies to the startup and venture capital scene in Silicon Valley.

Creative Commons provides tools for users to dedicate their works to the public domain. For some scientific data or educational resources the public domain provides the maximum flexibility and value.