Creative Commons Blog

The Wombat Speaks

Mia Garlick — 2006-04-21T15:54+00:00

Had fun presenting in Second Life last night...great crowd with interesting questions...there was quite a rush to get the CC-Ts at the end which was a fun choas and several people made their way over to the CC donation jar (which wasn't even at the event location) & $420 linden dollars were donated to CC - thank you!!

As with all things SL, it was a collaborative effort with Joi & his team providing the venue (thank you Aimee for donating the colosseum build), Alex & Jen assisting at the CC end with technical issues and preparing for the event, Liana for being patient with our newbie questions about SL and James for generating interest with his publicity (which attracted Boing Boing's attention!!).

James has already posted a brief report about the event and there are (of course) photos posted to Flickr here and here. Slides are here. Transcript should be ready by Monday, if anyone is interested.

If you missed this event or liked it and want to participate in future ones, join us in SL again at Pooley for a seminar on World Intellectual Property day at 2pm (East Coast Australia time) on Wednesday 26 April 2006 (for some of us it will actually be the day before World IP day because Australia is so far ahead in some many things, including time (we wombats have to support our peeps)). The discussion will include copyright, fair use, blogs, mash-ups, parody, and much more. Participants will include Brian Fitzgerald and Nic Suzor from the CC Australia team, Richard Neville and Dean Whitbread from funk.co.uk among others.

Copyright-free images lead to a fun animation

Mia Garlick — 2006-04-21T14:21+00:00

So the the American Institute of Graphics Arts (AIGA for short) and the U.S. Department of Transportation released a set of 50 universal symbols "copyright-free" online. The symbols are "designed for use at the crossroads of modern life: in airports and other transportation hubs and at large international events." They are intended to be clearly legible from a distance and comprehensible to people of different ages and cultures.

Iain Anderson took these images and produce a digital short called "airport", which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. As Iain says "I'm especially happy to see many blogs in different languages linking to airport, especially as that was the idea. I mean, the symbols were meant for international word-free understanding, it only makes sense that the animation should be word-free and universally understandable too."

CC travel sites acquired

Mike Linksvayer — 2006-04-21T01:19+00:00

Wikitravel and World66, two user generated content travel sites each using the same Creative Commons license (Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0) have been acquired by Internet Brands, the operator of carsdirect.com and many other .com properties.

It's great to see Internet Brands' confidence in a business built on CC-licensed content, particularly under a BY-SA license, which permits forking, even for commercial purposes.

Congratulations to World66, Wikitravel, and especially to Wikitravel cofounder Evan Prodromou, who has been an active supporter and constructive critic of Creative Commons from the beginning.

Sharing Is Daring: CC art show in Boston opens on April 27

Eric Steuer — 2006-04-20T15:09+00:00

Elizabeth Stark of Harvard Free Culture reports that Sharing Is Daring -- a terrific art show featuring works offered under Creative Commons licenses -- is ready to rock with an opening reception on April 27.

Harvard Free Culture presents Sharing is Daring, a showcase of new & derivative artworks released under flexible licenses that allow for sharing & remixing. The exhibition will feature a range of graphic, photography, video, and multimedia works by:

~ Abram Stern ~ Matt Vance ~ Elton Lovelace ~ Brian Zbriger ~ Suburban Kids with Biblical Names ~ Shanying Cui ~ Ben Sisto ~ Tim Jacques ~ Rebecca Rojer ~ Greg Perkins ~ Ryan Sciaino ~ David Meme ~ Matt Boch & Claire Chanel ~ selections from the 100 Second Film Festival ~

Please join us for our opening event on Thurs., Apr. 27, 2006 at 8pm at the Adams ArtSpace, Harvard University, Plympton at Bow St., in Cambridge, MA. Food and drink will be served.

For more information, visit sharingisdaring.com.

License adoption estimates

Mike Linksvayer — 2006-04-19T20:12+00:00

It's been awhile since the last time we posted estimates of the number of web pages under a Creative Commons license or a breakdown of how those licenses are distributed. The last aggregate estimate (45 million) was posted to our support the commons page in December, which has since changed (thanks yet again for your support!). The estimate appears in at least two interviews of our chair published on the web December and January at Technology Review and The Guardian.

We frequently get asked about license adoption, so I've created a page on license statistics that you can always visit for current and links to historical estimates and other statistics. Expect an updated aggregate estimate every six months -- next in June.

In addition to coarse estimates based on search engine queries we also have some promising growth numbers from individual CC-enabled content communities and curators. As of early this month Flickr hosted 10.8 million CC-licensed images and Soundclick hosted 219,000 CC-licensed songs, up from 4.1 million and 159,000 in August. Revver hosts 20,000 CC-licensed videos and did not launch until November. These are only a few of many CC-enabled hosts.

There have been some small changes in the types of licenses being used since last February. A current chart is reproduced below, see the previous link for a year-ago chart.

Distribution of licenses deployed. Those without 'by' (attribution) were not versioned past 1.0 (excepting public domain, which is not versioned).

The small change appears to be in the direction of using more liberal licenses. Attribution, Attribution-NonCommercial and Attribution-ShareAlike all gained bigger slices of a (much larger) pie while Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike and Attribution-NoDerivs have smaller shares relative to a year ago.

The proportionate use of the NonCommercial, NoDerivs, and ShareAlike properties have all declined slightly due to the increased use of more liberal licenses (with fewer prohibitions and requirements).

License Property	February 2005	April 2006
NonCommercial	74%	71%
NoDerivs	33%	28%
ShareAlike	49%	48%

Mia Garlick to Present Copyright Basics in Second Life

Jon Phillips — 2006-04-18T03:44+00:00

Mia Garlick, Creative Commons' General Counsel, goes in-world in Second Life to discuss copyright issues and the "Some Rights Reserved" licensing perspective this Thursday, April 20, 2006 at 6 PM PST. The event takes place at the new Creative Commons land on Kula Island.

As previously noted here and by previous CC Salon presenter Wagner James Au's "Creating the Commons" post, Creative Commons now has a presence in Second Life.

Teleport to our new land, come for Mia's presentation and keep tabs on this growing virtual presence by joining our Second Life community.

Summer of Code and Commons

Mike Linksvayer — 2006-04-17T01:29+00:00

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!

Futures of Music

Mike Linksvayer — 2006-04-16T02:07+00:00

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.

ccPublisher 2 beta reviewed

Mike Linksvayer — 2006-04-14T17:17+00:00

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.

Wealth of Networks

Mike Linksvayer — 2006-04-14T17:25+00:00

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.

MusicIP and MusicBrainz track CC

Mike Linksvayer — 2006-04-12T14:29+00:00

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...

Crammed Discs Remix Contest at ccMixter!

Eric Steuer — 2006-04-12T12:13+00:00

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.

Netsquared interview

Mike Linksvayer — 2006-04-11T23:41+00:00

Marshall Kirkpatrick interviewed me at SXSW and used the interview as the basis for a nice article about Creative Commons at Netsquared.

Creative Commons presents: CC Salon 2, San Francisco

Jon Phillips — 2006-04-10T20:39+00:00

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.

Submit your short DIY video to the MAKE: Movies film festival

Eric Steuer — 2006-04-10T14:42+00:00

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.