A startup called Lisensa, owned by Top10 Media, launched its service for automating blog content licensing transactions.  Lisensa was founded by legal scholars from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, and its scheme is based on the Creative Commons framework.  In addition to automating the various noncommercial licensing terms that Creative Commons supports, Lisensa can also support commercial transactions, from which it takes a cut of the revenue.  A portion of its profits will go to Creative Commons and the Berkman Center.

It was only a matter of time until services like this started appearing.  Repeat after us, folks, whether you like it or not: Creative Commons is a rights management technology.  Creative Commons is a rights management technology.  Creative Commons is a rights management technology.  Just not one that uses encryption or other means of content protection -- although the two are by no means mutually exclusive.

Lisensia is actually a spiritual descendent of the so-called syndication technologies that appeared during the dot-com bubble, such as iSyndicate and Screaming Media.  It takes advantage of a critical mass of innovations that came about after the bubble burst: blogs (simple units of Internet content), RSS feeds (a simple standard for syndicating such content), and Creative Commons (a simple rights management standard for consumer created content). 

There is a strong argument that firms like iSyndicate and Screaming Media would have succeeded if those innovations had been in place.  There is an equally strong argument here for simple standards instead of over-engineered ones: the bubble-era services had to contend with a variety of content formats, proprietary rights management schemes, and a syndication protocol standard called ICE that collapsed under the weight of its own complexity.  The bubble-era services had to build too much infrastructure that was too complicated for individual content creators to use.

Perhaps the greatest service that Lisensia is performing is clearing some of the politically correct smog over Creative Commons and illuminating the schemes true nature and utility.  It seems to us that a service like Lisensia does not have much in the way of "secret sauce" or barriers to entry.  Therefore we suspect that many more Creative Commons-based rights licensing services will appear -- and that once enough bloggers take advantage of them, that a lucky handful of them will make attractive acquisition targets for the big Internet players looking to monetize consumer created content.

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