Creative Commons - An Ethical & Fair Way for Creators to Share

Creative Commons is an easy, ethical and fair way for creators to get their work into the world. It has created a more level playing field that discourages gatekeeping and restrictive copyright culture. It encourages open creativity by allowing creators to select how they would like their work to be used in the world through through a series of self-selective licenses.

The Open Moji Project used Creative Commons
The Open Moji emoji set used by Emoji Expressions is licensed under the CC BY SA license, which allows the work (emojis created by the Open Moji project team) to be "distributed, remixed, adapted, and built upon in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use."   

The work that the Open Moji team did on their open source library, inspired part of my vision for Emoji Expression and future projects to be announced. The idea of using an open source emoji set that isn't proprietary to help bring emoji IRL to help solve communications problems between digital and physical worlds has actually been on my mind for years in the form of universal languages (music, emotions, body language, etc...). I've worked on several promising projects and technology with my ideas and their tech that didn't always come to fruition because of rights issues, engineering issues, control issues and sometimes outright theft. 

I'm a major fan of open source because it levels the playing field in many ways. The Internet was meant to do the same thing. Sometimes it creates a greater digital divide, but many times it creates opportunity and abundance. What I have learned is that you have to protect yourself. And be really rigorous about how you protect your IP - from ideas to creativity to innovation - not just tech. 

How did this work for Emoji Expression?
Once I decided that the Open Moji emoji set would work with my vision, I set about figuring out how to honor the Creative Commons CC BY SA license and to build upon it. I did research. Reading and watching videos for about a week.

I tried to reach out to the original professors in Germany, but it was the holiday break (the project was on hiatus on GitHub), they weren't on Twitter (thanks to you-know-who... and I got put on a Mastodon waiting list). It was already posted on their site exactly how to use the library, so after I felt I'd done my due diligence, I thought about how I wanted to use the emojis long term.

I started playing around with POD tech and trying to figure the platforms I wanted to use. And how I could make it experiential. This matters because I didn't just want to hawk products - not the point!