proposing legislation on Creative Commons for the 2025 Community of Christ World Conference

Even after many years of attending, being a member of, and now serving in Community of Christ, I’m still alternately surprised by how many things are the same as my Latter-day Saint upbringing and how many things are different. In the latter category, even though I’ve intellectually understood this for a while, it still surprises me that the World Conferences of Community of Christ (renamed from General Conferences in the 1960s) are sites of debate and discussion rather than a series of sermons.

In fact, I began the process just over a year ago to submit legislation for debate and discussion at the 2025 World Conference, and it’s gone through all the hoops, so I’m going to get a chance next May to propose the legislation and see how representatives of the church from all over the world respond to it over the course of debate on the conference floor. The text of my resolution is pretty brief:

Resolved, That the appropriate team or presiding officers, in consultation with other World Church leaders, consider the possibility of applying Creative Commons licenses to some or all of the creative works currently copyrighted by all corporations associated with the World Church.

Creative Commons licenses are modified forms of copyright that (typically) require attribution to the original author but allow for free distribution and (usually) modification of the original creative work in ways that copyright itself typically does not. As Community of Christ wrestles with financial and demographic constraints in the future, I personally feel that embracing Creative Commons is a way for us to “keep circulating the tapes” with older materials that we won’t have the resources to keep in print; perhaps more importantly, explicitly giving permission to remix and update church materials may be a way for us to keep getting updated church materials as the budget for that sort of thing also diminishes.

I recently had a chance to appear on Community of Christ’s (semi)official podcast to talk about this resolution, its inspiration, why I think it’s important, and a few other things. The resulting episode is here (or there’s a transcript here, too). I’m not sure I did the best job of explaining my thinking, I’m pretty sure I spent too much time acknowledging risks instead of why I think the benefits outweigh those risks, and my mic quality isn’t the best, but it was a great opportunity to share some of this. In the months to come, I’ll have other chances to make my case for this, and I’m sure I’ll be writing more about it on this blog, so I thought it might be good to share some of my thinking on the resolution up to this point.

• macro
• Communities
• World Conference
• Creative Commons
• Community of Christ
• World Conference 2025
• intellectual property
• copyright