Creative Commons Blog

Creative Commons is participating in Google's 2006 Summer of Code as a mentoring organization. If you're a student please read the Summer of Code Student FAQ, check out CC's Tech Challenges and start thinking about your application. Student proposals will be accepted May 1 through May 8.

We'll have a page dedicated to SoC 2006 fleshed out over the next week. You could build infrastructure for the commons and earn $4500. :) Thanks to Google for making this possible!

Wednesday night's CC Salon San Francisco concerned the future of music.

James Polanco spoke about Fake Science's CC licensed podcasts and emphasized that Fake Science is not a record label, but a digital distributor with a far lower cost structure -- and lower costs for both artists and patrons. Fake Science has a great slogan: Be a Patron of the Arts, Not a Consumer.

However, business is tangential to the future of music: how it is made and what it sounds like.

Bob Ostertag and Lucas Gonze each gave deep, highly compressed thoughts on the future of music that I will not attempt to summarize here. Watch for future articles and blog posts from them. One point they seemed to agree on is that though the constraints have changed (e.g., decline in mechanical reproduction, album-length works and album-length attention spans), new constraints are just as interesting. Gonze suggested that a new generation of "blog musicians" will slowly build up a body of small, inexpensive works.

Bob Ostertag speaks.

Minus Kelvin giving a shout out to Victor Stone and ccMixter.

Photos by Ryan Junell licensed under CC BY 2.0.

The next CC Salon San Francisco is May 10, featuring Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager at Google, Ken Goldberg of UC Berkeley, Tiffany Schlain of the Webby Awards, and Abram Stern and Michael Dale of Metavid. Be there then or be cube.

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.

Via Boing Boing.

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.

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.

MAKE (which is, incidentally, one of the coolest magazines around) is hosting the MAKE: Movies film festival as part of the Maker Faire, taking place on April 22 and 23 at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. You've got a few more days (until Wednesday, April 12) to submit your CC-licensed project demo videos, DIY tech documentaries, and how-to clips. Need music that you can use noncommercially in your entry? Check out one of the sites indexed on our audio page.

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.

What is iCommons?

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.