Creative Commons Blog
NewsForge has reviewed ccPublisher 2 beta 1 (beta 2 is now available):
Beta 1 offers a sparse, straightforward interface. Follow a few prompts to select applicable files for upload, enter metadata for the Internet Archive listings, and select a CC license and the files' formats. The program uploads all the information to the Internet Archive, where it appears within 24 hours.
The ccPublisher 2 team plan several useful features for the official release, including complete conversion to the more modular and extensible ccPublisher 2 architecture, support for extensions and plugins, and easy customization for third-party developers.
The ccPublisher 2 developers have already set their sights on version 1.1, which they say will embed CC metadata into numerous formats and offer full support for localization. They also hope to allow users to extract existing metadata from the media files themselves, making the process much faster, particularly when uploading a large number of files.
The current ccPublisher 2 beta release is a useful, yet somewhat limited, application for Internet Archive publishing. But if its development road map is an indicator, ccPublisher 2 is set to become an invaluable tool in the future.
Thanks Sean "Nz17" Robinson of NewsForge! Note that ccPublisher 2.1 is the version that will include full localization. It is due for release, appropriately enough, during the iCommons summit this summer.
Yochai Benkler has published his new book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license. A brief excerpt (page 482):
[W]e are seeing an ever-more self-conscious adoption of commons-based practices as a modality of infor- mation production and exchange. Free software, Creative Commons, the Public Library of Science, the new guidelines of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on free publication of papers, new open archiving practices, librarian movements, and many other communities of practice are devel- oping what was a contingent fact into a self-conscious social movement. As the domain of existing information and culture comes to be occupied by information and knowledge produced within these free sharing movements and licensed on the model of open-licensing techniques, the problem of the conflict with the proprietary domain will recede. Twentieth-century materials will continue to be a point of friction, but a sufficient quotient of twenty- first-century materials seem now to be increasingly available from sources that are happy to share them with future users and creators. If this social- cultural trend continues over time, access to content resources will present an ever-lower barrier to nonmarket production.
There's a book release party this evening in New York City.
Audio fingerprinting (and more) company MusicIP has added the ability to attach a Creative Commons license to audio tracks registered via their ListenerLink service (press release; PDF).
Community music metadatabase MusicBrainz is working with MusicIP's fingerprinting technology and has also added the ability to track CC licenses, see details on the MusicBrainz blog.
This will be a good year for "open music infrastructure" and CC will be a big part of that...
We're pleased to announce a new Creative Commons remix contest in conjunction with Crammed Discs over at our community remix site, ccMixter. Crammed artists Cibelle, DJ Dolores, and Apollo Nove -- some of Brazil's most innovative contemporary musicians -- are offering new sounds online under a Creative Commons BY-NC license, so people throughout the world can legally use them in remixes, mash-ups, and new compositions. Nine winning remixes will appear on a Crammed/ccMixter EP project to be sold online through digital music stores.
Marshall Kirkpatrick interviewed me at SXSW and used the interview as the basis for a nice article about Creative Commons at Netsquared.
Please join us for the second CC Salon, taking place in San Francisco on Wednesday, April 12 from 6-9 PM at Shine (1337 Mission Street between 8th and 9th Streets). CC Salon is a casual get-together focused on conversation and community-building with 2-3 brief presentations from individuals and groups developing projects with relationship to Creative Commons. Please invite your friends, colleagues, and anyone you know who might be interested in drinks and discussion. We look forward to seeing you there!
Following the first successful salon, this event focuses on "Net-based Music." James Polanco is presenting about "Podcasting and the Fake Science Digital Music Store" and
Lucas Gonze is talking about "How the Net is Changing Music." Lucas Gonze is the creator of Webjay and is a frequent Creative Commons supporter. Also, we have a special surprise guest composer Bob Ostertag.
We've set up http://creativecommons.org/salon where you can find the latest information about CC Salon. It is also place where the community may contribute ideas, make suggestions, and submit proposals for future events.
You can track this event on upcoming.org along with every future monthly 2nd Wednesday CC Salon.
At this year's SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, John Wilbanks, Executive Director of Science Commons, moderated a panel on Open Science. The panel is now available as a podcast, thanks to the good folks at SXSW.
Bjorn Wijers of CC Netherlands sends this about the successful premier of Elephants Dream (previous post -- Your textures in a movie):
The Blender movie 'Elephants Dream' (previously known under the working title Orange) was released last friday with a crowded but nice premiere at the Ketelhuis in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Elephants Dream is the world's first film which was completely created using Open Source Software and released under the Creative Commons Attribution license. The film was realised by the Blender Foundation, known by the excellent 3D open source program Blender, and The Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time Based Arts.
Summary from Motevideo:
Elephants Dream is a story with quick-witted dialogue, tightly designed architecture and unusual sound effects. The main characters, Emo (a cool young trumpeter) and Proog (a confused – or maybe not? – loner) are each stuck in a world of their own. At a certain moment they cross paths with one another. The oddball Proog cautiously tries to introduce his young friend Emo to his world. When Emo realizes that Proog primarily wants to push his ideas on him, this leads to a conflict between them. But can Emo survive in Proog’s world? And can they overcome their conflicts, or will they each go their own way in life? Tygo Gernandt and Cas Jansen create two unique personalities that command the imagination, and carry the viewer along into a bizarre world that consists of a bleak wasteland with a tangle of cables and other alien landscapes, a living typewriter, an enormous elevator shaft, and especially a lot of very strange birds.
The DVD can be ordered and more information is available at orange.blender.org, with downloads to follow.
Post about the premier on the CC Netherlands blog (Dutch).
Creative Commons licenses ported to Mainland China were launched last week. Photos from the launch event are on Flickr with the ccchina tag. A post in Chinese is here.
Photo by Shi Zhao licensed under CC BY.
Weekly two hour radio program dedicated to CC-licensed music Black Sweater White Cat initiated WBCR's new live stream last week. Now you can catch the program every Saturday at 9PM EDT (Sunday 1AM GMT) and not have to wait for the podcast.
BSWC host Biotic writes in:
Next week we will be talking to Lisa DeBenedictis during the first part of the program, shortly after 9 EDT. Plan on talking about the impact of CC on her career and the difference that ccMixter has made in her distribution across the Internet.
Previous post on BSWC: Start your own netlabel.
Every major software release has bugs and ccHost 2.0, released last week, is no exception. Today we released ccHost 2.0.1, fixing a problem with contests and making it easier to install in a non-webroot directory. (ccHost is the GPL-licensed web app that runs ccMixter, read all about it here.)
In other development news Nathan has migrated CC software projects, ccHost included, to SourceForge's new Subversion revision control service. Our repository is documented here. Thanks SourceForge!
The iCommons site is now live with some exciting news about this summer's iSummit.
Incubated by Creative Commons, iCommons is an organisation with a broad vision to develop a united global commons front by collaborating with open content, access to knowledge, open access publishing and free culture communities around the world.
Using the annual iCommons Summit as the main driver of this vision, iCommons will feature projects that encourage collaboration across borders and communities, and promote the tools, models and practice that facilitate universal participation in the cultural and knowledge domains. The Summit will collaborate with organisations and communities from around the world to demonstrate and share best practice and discuss strategies for continuing the positive impact that “sharing” practices are having on participation in the cultural and knowledge domains.
During the year iCommons will incubate projects that cross borders and unite commons communities, acting as a platform for international collaboration towards the growth and enlivening of a global digital commons.
We're pleased to announce that we have added to new members to our Board. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame and Laurie Racine, one time President of the Center for the Public Domain and Chair and co-founder of Public Knowledge. More details here.
We've just released ccHost 2.0, the GPL-licensed software platform that powers ccMixter. Thanks to Victor Stone for months of mad coding (when he's not remixing) and Jon Phillips for packaging the release.
I've already blogged about two new features included in this release, remix statistics and the sample pool API, but there's much more. Check out the press release for details.
"A comet hits Reading" by Tom Chance, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA Submitted by Eric Steuer on 2006-03-28 09:43 AM.
SectionZ is an electronic music community that is home to more than 650 Creative Commons-licensed tracks. There are lots of truly excellent CC sounds on the site -- some of my favorites are Vaetxh's spacy drum 'n' bass anthem "The Moon Is to the Stars as a Dust Mote Is to Mars" and Smiff's driving trance track "Tilt."
Influential avant garde musician and activist Bob Ostertag has made all of his recordings that he has the rights to available as digital downloads under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license:
These works are now covered by a Creative Commons "Attribution Non-commercial" license that permits you to freely download, copy, remix, sample, manipulate, fold, spindle, tamper with, defuse, detox, or deconstruct - as long as you credit my work as a source, and the work you make is not marketed commercially.
That's a pretty standard explanation of BY-NC, but do read the rest of Ostertag's mini-essay on his decision.
About 8 hours from 11 CDs are now available for download, including the notorious PantyChrist album with Otomo Yoshihide (dj) and Justin Bond (vocals) and other work with Mike Patton, Fred Frith, and others.
Ostertag's music requires "sustained, concentrated listening" that is well rewarded. Check out the excerpt High Performance's review of Sooner or Later for a textual preview. Don't worry about downloading the large music files -- they are generously hosted by the Internet Archive for free. Enjoy listening and remixing!
Following on from the recent decision in a Dutch Court, Creative Commons licenses have also been implicated in a decision in Spain. The issue in this case was not whether the CC license was enforceable, but instead whether the major collecting society in Spain could collect royalties from a bar that played CC-licensed music.
Unfortunately, as we explain on our site, because most collecting societies, especially in Europe (but not in the US), take an assignment of rights from the artist, artists who are members of these collecting societies are not free to CC-license their works. And so far, collecting societies have been reluctant to explore how they could enable those of their members, who are interested in CC-licensing, to do so.
Consequently, it seemed a little odd when in the Fall of 2005, the main Spanish collecting society — Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (“SGAE”) — sued Ricardo Andrés Utrera Fernández, the owner of Metropol, a disco bar located in in Badajoz alleging that he had failed to pay SGAE’s license fee of 4.816,74 € for the period from November 2002 to August 2005 for the public performance of music managed by the collecting society.
On February 17th, 2006, the Lower Court number six of Badajoz, a city in Extremadura, Spain, rejected the collecting society’s claims because the owner of the bar proved that the music he was using was not managed by the society. The music performed in the bar was licensed under CC licenses that allows that public display since the authors have already granted those rights. Specifically, the judge said:
“The author possesses some moral and economic rights on his creation. And the owner of these rights, he can manage them as he considers appropriate, being able to yield the free use, or hand it over partially. "Creative Commons" licenses are different classes of authorizations that the holder of his work gives for a more or less free or no cost use of it. They exist as … different classes of licenses of this type … they allow third parties to be able to use music freely and without cost with greater or minor extension; and in some of these licenses, specific uses require the payment of royalties. The defendant proves that he makes use of music that is handled by their authors through these Creative Commons licenses.“The full text of the decision (in Spanish) is available here.
This case sets a new precedent because previously, every time that the SGAE claimed a license fee from a bar, a restaurant or a shop for public performance of music, the courts have ruled in their favor on the basis that the collecting society represents practically all the authors. This case shows that there is more music that can be enjoyed and played publicly than that which is managed by the collecting societies.
As CC Spain project lead Ignasi Labastida said: “This decision demonstrates that authors can choose how to manage their rights for their own benefit and anyone can benefit from that choice, too. I expect that collecting societies will understand that something has to change to face this new reality,”
Let's hope that Creative Commons-licensing and collecting societies will be able to work together in future. If you are an artist who is a member of a collecting society and interested in CC-licensing some of your work, let your society know how you feel so we can get to the future faster!
