Creative Commons Blog

This year's Freedom to Creativity festival is underway in Zagreb, Croatia, featuring a lecture by John Wilbanks of Science Commons on "The Impact of Patents and Licensing on the Commons" and free culture performances by artists from Croatia and Serbia and Montenegro.

Creative Commons licenses for Croatia were announced at last year's festival. Happy one year anniversary!

The Soundclick music community passed the 200,000 mark for CC-licensed mp3s over the weekend. That's a whole lot of music.

Soundclick doesn't offer CC-specific search or feeds, which rather points out an opportunity for aggregators.

Forunately Google and Yahoo! have both indexed the Soundclick site rather well. Click on one of the previous links or type site:soundclick.com into the search form on the CC find page, which allows you to search Soundclick using Google or Yahoo!'s CC-enabled search.

That's a whole lot of music.

As I procrastinatefinish my slides for a talk on Semantic Search on the Public Web with Creative Commons at the 2006 Semantic Technology Conference (March 6-9, San Jose, California) I note that the closing keynote makes some pretty heady predictions:

Markets for semantic technology products and services will grow 10-fold from 2006 to 2010 to more than $50B worldwide. Near-term drivers include 2-10X gains in performance for information-intensive processes across a broad range of applications and domains. From 2010 to 2020 semantic technology markets will grow ten-fold again, fueling trillion-dollar world-wide economic expansions. Longer-term drivers are new capabilities for knowledge-intensive activities, tasks, and processes that will tap new sources of value, delivering performance gains up to 100-fold.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it with Giving it Away (for Fun and Profit), Business 2.0's article claiming Creative Commons could be the key to a new multibillion-dollar industry. Ponder what would happen if you mashed up these nascent multibillion-dollar industries? Fortunately some of the forward thinkers who started Creative Commons already thought of that.

Creative Commons board member Hal Abelson and advisor Ben Adida will also be presenting at the conference on Interoperable Metadata for a Bottom-Up Semantic Web, as will CC advisor Eric Miller, on Recombinant Business, appropriately enough.

If this post gave you a hype headache please go listen to some chill. You'll get over it.

A few days ago we turned on a completely redesigned public wiki. The main content there now focuses on software developers. Shortly the entire technology section of the CC site will move to the wiki and will no longer be embarrassingly out of date.

I want to especially draw attention to our technology challenges page. If you're a developer looking to help CC with your coding skills this is a good place to look, and will get much better soon, updates to be posted here.

Non-developers may want to check out the content curators page on the wiki. Web communities that encourage CC licensing of user generated audio, video, text, images, and more are popping up all over the world to the extent that we can't keep track. Please add to this page.

Potential contributors do take note -- the CC wiki requires registration with a valid email address, which must be confirmed, as one of several spam prevention mechanisms installed. Sorry for the inconvenience.

We've wanted to relaunch the CC wiki for awhile, but the particulars took some inspriation from the Mono Project, Hula Project and others who have built wiki-based sites that look great. We're happy to be part of this trend.

CC designer Alex Roberts is immediately responsible for the CC wiki's design and software engineer Nathan Yergler for the coding, standing on the shoulders of giants.

Although the CC Malaysia project was only launched in December 2005 and the Malaysian version of the CC licenses are slated for release in early March 2006, under the stewardship of project lead Dr. Ng Alina, the CC concept has received some welcome initial support in Malaysia. Several musicians have explained how Creative Commons licensing can assist both with the development of the local music scene and also assist musicians to embrace, for their own benefit, the sharing of music by their fans.

According to Wong Yu Ri, lead guitarist of the band Frequency Cannon:

"Creative Commons is one of the tools that local musicians can use to protect their works. But it’s just a form of licensing; how you create your music, how you market yourself, how you help create a better, more diverse scene, and how you help others will be the things that make a difference to the local music scene."

Yu Ri also observed that fighting music piracy should take a more flexible approach than merely combating copyright violations. "I feel it’s not quite about 'fighting piracy,' it's about working with it. People share music. You can't help that. It’s like fighting a forest fire that keeps on coming and no one really wins."

Oh, and if you are a Malaysian citizen 17 years or older, check out the CC Malaysia project team's competition.

Monday evening I had the pleasure of presenting to the Purdue Linux User Group (PLUG) and Purdue Computing Society in West Lafayette, Indiana. Unlike previous talks I've done, this one wasn't about a specific development I'm working on, but rather an overview of CC and metadata. In particular we had a good discussion about the need for relevant, accurate metadata, and the intersection points between embedded metadata and applications. As is typical in my experience, things were the most interesting when there were questions and a dialog about what's going on, but if you're interested, my slides are available online. Overall it was a lot of fun, and good to see a group of students really interested in Creative Commons and the work we do.

Cool new global video contest from a community media center in Lowell, Massachusetts: the 100 Second Festival. The deadline for entry is May 1. Entries must be CC licensed and are available for download with Bittorrent. The winners will be screened in Lowell this summer.

Yep, your submission must be 100 seconds or less. Got it?

The first Black Sweater White Cat of the year is an all-Comfort Stand program -- two hours featuring twenty Comfort Stand tracks and an extended interview with Otis Fodder and Mr. Melvis, two of the netlabel's musician-operators. If you don't want to hear about how great Creative Commons and the Internet Archive are, or be at least a little bit inspired to start your own CC-licensed netlabel, do not listen.

BSWC is a weekly program, so there have already been two additional shows this year. The most recent show (playlist) is particularly excellent. It's really cool to see CC music programs feeding off each other:

Many thanks to Grant Robertson and his new project, CC365. CC365 is providing a real service to both the musicians and fans of the CC music community. This program features three songs from his second week. I have two computers subscribed to his feed. Check it out...there are 350 tunes left in 2006.

William Patry, a partner at Thelen Reid & Priest, New York City, specializing in copyright trial litigation and appellate advocacy and formerly copyright counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary and also formerly a Policy Planning Advisor to the Register of Copyrights, mused recently on the influence artists feel both from their contemporaries and predecessors. Patry has apparently been reading Harold Bloom's book The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry and quotes Bloom that:

"...self-appropriation involves immense anxieties of indebtedness, for what strong maker desires the realization that he has failed to create himself? Oscar Wilde, who knew he had failed as a poet because he lacked strength to overcome his anxiety of influence, knew also the darker truths concerning influence."

Patry has also been reading Benjamin Kaplan who observed:

"Copyright is in danger of stifling such wrestling with ourselves and with our predecessors: by seizing on all appropriation as a legal -- and moral-- shortcoming -- we fail to appreciate the creative process, and will end up the poorer for it."

Patry concludes that copyright is often pitched as a battle between copyright owners and copyright users but argues that it should perhaps more appropriately be viewed as involving "issues with other authors, and within ourselves" and that we should facilitate the working out of creative anxieties. This can also be described as the derivative works paradox -- when can you say that a work is truly original and when is it a derivative work?

John "Searchblog" Battelle's #1 prediction for 2006 (emphasis added):

1. Someone, and I do not know who, will make a big pile of Big Media video assets freely available on the web - and not via Google Video. This will be a major studio, or television company, which will realize that once you free content, content will come back to you in mashed up and remixed glory that has - holy smokes! - real business models like advertising and retail attached. The deal will be simple: anyone can download, rip, and mix this video, but if you plan to make money from it - even selling ads next to it - you have to cut a deal with the mother ship. The company that does this will be heralded as either visionary, lunatic, or both.

Attribution-NonCommercial, anyone?

Battelle posted his predictions December 21, so perhaps this observation is a bit late, but this year is less than four percent over...

So we at CC love to watch Flickr. We love to watch the number of CC-licensed images grow and grow...We love to check out recent images that are posted to Flickr from people in different places about the things that they are witnessing on a day to day level - whether it's the snowstorms on the East Coast of the US, the latest Burning Man or more serious events such as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina or the London bombings. The photos uploaded to Flickr in many ways reflect the different daily zeitgeists in different parts of the globe. So we're thrilled to learn that our Creative Commons' t-shirts are Flickr worthy and becoming part of the daily Flickr zeitgeist. And, of course, these photos are CC-licensed.

This one is BY-NC-SA 2.0; BY=bigmick....and you'll be pleased to know, that it's not too late for you to get your own version of Creative Commoner 2005 T.

So the topic of what constitutes a "noncommercial use" under those Creative Commons licenses that contain the NonCommercial license option has been a perennial source of debate over the years. Shortly after I first started with Creative Commons, I posted an interpretation of "noncommercial" to the cc-education list which was consistent with that community's understanding of the term but which then seemed to cause considerable consternation on the cc-licenses list. This also lead to what may be able to be described as one of the most comprehensive noncommercial use cases list in the history of, well, a lot of things.

To reconcile the otherwise potentially different views of different CC communities and try to clarify some of the easier and more realistic use cases, we at CC and through our international network of affiliates have been working over many months (with the invaluable assistance of one of our summer interns - Laura Lynch who spent her summer on the issue - on trying to draft possible guidelines on what does and what does not constitute a noncommercial use. Obviously, it's not possible to define noncommercial for every single situation. However, we have attempted to craft these guidelines to resolve some of the more common and pressing questions about what is and what is not a noncommercial use in the CC world.

These guidelines have undergone tremendous internal debate and discussion amongst staff and our international affiliates. They have been considerably improved and revised in the process so, particularly in light of the most recent discussion on the list we thought now would be a great opportunity to expand the debate and invite more analysis, debate and discussion from all of you who are also heavily involved in the practices and application of CC licenses.

Please note - these guidelines are not set in stone; they are a draft subject to debate, discussion and refinement by all those who adopt CC licenses and use CC licensed content, ie. you. Let us know what you think - these guidelines have been posted here. Join the discussion here.

There's an update to mozCC available. You can find all the gory details here, but suffice it to say you really should upgrade. This release fixes a couple of naggling bugs, and adds support for Flock. Flock is a browser based on the Mozilla Firefox codebase which integrates several interesting tools to make your browsing experience more seamless. Ideas? Suggestions? Write them down and we'll see what we can do.

Ever wondered what Lawrence Lessig sounds like in Catalan? In addition to having Maria Cristinia Alvite and the iRights.info project translating the Lessig Letters into Spanish, we are also privileged to have Ignasi Labastida i Juan, the project lead for CC Spain, translating the Lessig Letters into Catalan. Thank you Ignasi!

Grant Robinson is doing his part to make the new year uncommonly great. He's launched CC:365, a project/podcast to highlight a great CC licensed song every single day of the year. Check out Day One.

Grant also would up 2005 with episodes of The Revolution (unofficial ccMixter 2005 countdown) and Staccato as a guest DJ.

2005 also brought a third program/podcast of all CC music, eight episodes of Songs from the Commons, with Lisa Rein as dj. The most recent show is the strongest yet.

While numerous podcasts feature CC licensed music, as far as I know Staccato, The Revolution, and Songs from the Commons are the only program-length podcasts to feature only CC licensed music.

Black Sweater, White Cat is also worth mentioning, as it features almost all CC licensed music, and is a full two hour weekly program broadcast at WBCR, a community radio station in western Massachusetts, also available as a podcast. The program is really excellent--I've listened to many hours of BSWC archives, and plan to listen to every show in 2006.

Know of other CC-only music programs? Leave a comment.

Rumor has it an all-funk guest hosted episode of Staccato is coming soon. Listen in...

We launched the 2005 fundraising campaign in October and have received an outpouring of gifts from so many dedicated people who also believe what we at CC believe: that supporting free culture in all its forms is paramount. Your donations are greatly appreciated.

Because of this tremendous community support, the groundwork for CC’s fundraising program is in place. 2006 will bring many more opportunities for CC to serve the public, create programs for individual Commoners to connect and participate, provide networking forums and events for CC’s new Corporate Commoners Program and encourage and involve continuing institutional support. Stay tuned! 2006 will have many surprises!

Thanks again for each and every gift to CC (and please keep them coming so we can make our goal!). We’re looking forward to providing the community with more services, opportunities and fun events that will keep this movement growing.