Creative Commons Blog
The Crammed Discs Remix Contest at ccMixter only began accepting submissions yesterday, and we've already got a few incredible entries. A couple of early faves: "Psychedelic Hospital" by Lipo (also known as NOMANSLAND on ccMixter) and the "Sanidade" remix by Foundation IV.
Calling all producers: you've got about a month left to enter the fray! Visit ccMixter to download audio source files from Cibelle, DJ Dolores, and Apollo Nove (all offered to the public for free under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 license), and use them to make your own remixes. Nine winning tracks will appear on a Crammed/ccMixter remix project to be sold online through digital music stores. For more information, please see our press release.
Gonzo SF novelist John Sundman was an early adopter of Creative Commons and of publishing books on the web before Creative Commons existed. About three years ago I read his first two books, Acts of the Apostles and Cheap Complex Devices (both highly recommended) and intended to interview him shortly after. The interview didn't happen (entirely my fault), but with serialization of The Pains now is an opportune time to reopen the Sundman files...
Three years ago you licensed two books under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, now you're serializing a third, The Pains, under the current version of the same license. As a repeat user, how has Creative Commons and this license worked for you?
The biggest consequence of my using the Creative Commons license has been the change in my own head.
In 1999, in what was a relatively rare move at the time, I put the first 13 chapters of Acts of the Apostles, in HTML, up on my website wetmachine. This was a teaser, about one third of the book. If you wanted to read the rest of the story, you had to buy the book from me. This strategy worked very well. I was a totally unknown, self-published author, and within a few months I was getting book orders from everywhere. Michigan! Florida! Saskatchewan! Korea! Sweden! Singapore! I was so paranoid about "losing sales" to people who would read the whole book online that I didn't even have the sources on a machine that was connected to the Internet.
In 2002, I put the first bit of Cheap Complex Devices online in HTML, and made the PDF of the whole book available for five bucks. This was an honor system, no DRM, and I was nervous about it. I sold about a hundred such licenses, which was a pretty easy way to earn $$.
Then I went to Etech in 2003 and found out about Creative Commons, and impulsively in the spirit of the moment, I put the complete sources to both books up. I actually did this while at Etech, with the help of Rusty Foster, of Kuro5hin fame.
Already my thinking had started to change. Whereas before I had been concerned about "canabalizing" sales of my books (and ebooks), I had started to become more concerned with creating a wider audience. I saw what Cory Doctorow was doing, self-promotionwise, and it was clear that he was a rising star. Now, I love Cory and his books, but I don't think they're any better than my own, so I had to ask myself "why him and not me"? And part of the answer, in addition to his incredible work ethic and outgoing personality and sheer volume of output, was that he was giving his stuff away, and even encouraging people to mash it up. "Mashing up" was and still is considered "ripping off" by lots and lots of people -- I used to be in that camp -- and so his way of looking at things was a challenge to me. But the results were good for him, and besides, it looked like fun.
People continue to download my books and they continue to buy print copies. I assume that having the free PDFs has contributed to my overall sales rate of printed books, but I have no way to test that hypothesis. It's not like I'm getting rich off of this hobby, by the way. In a good year I make a few thousand bucks. I could probably make more money with a lemonade stand. But I'm certain that having the books available has made them more visible, and has made self publishing at least plausible, and more fun. People assume self-published books suck, and I used to spend a lot of energy defending myself to cynics and skeptics. But when your books are completely available for free online, you don't have to spend any energy at all trying to convince people that you are a legitimate writer. And now Cory Doctorow has initiated this meme that I'm a "gonzo SF novelist." Hey look, I'm a rock star! That's kind of neat.
The reason I like the Creative Commons "no derivatives" license is that I think at least one of my books would make a great movie, and it would piss me off no end if some big corporate studio were to get rich off of it and not compensate me. I don't like big media companies, in general. So Creative Commons makes me feel like I'm not totally naked in that respect. (Not that I think that was a likely development, but one never knows, does one?)
Nowadays I don't spend any energy at all worrying about how to "protect" my investment in writing. I just don't think about it. Rather, I think about how to make more of the opportunities afforded by today's technology. I'm pretty old fashioned in a lot of ways and I'm not of the gee-whiz camp that a lot of your readers are. I'm more of a technoparanoid than a champion of the future. But I figure that I'm not going to stop the tide, so I might as well have some fun surfing.
Thanks for that very informative answer. I hate to be a pain but there's an obvious followup. The "no derivatives" part of the license is a blanket prohibition on derivative works (excepting fair use of course), including noncommercial "mash ups." The noncommercial provision by itself prevents big corporate studios (or anyone) from making money with your work without first negotiating with you. Usually people use a "no derivatives" license because they don't want their message changed or in the interest of artistic integrity. Could you expand on why you chose "no derivatives" or perhaps consider switching to a license that allows derivatives as Cory did after a year? :-)
For the time being I think I'll leave as is for three reasons:
1) Because the artwork is copyrighted to the artist, Matthew Frederick Davis Hemming, I don't want to offer a blanket release on rights to my part of the book lest there be any confusion about that. He and I have not worked out how we feel about modifications to " the-thing-as-it-is". Also, because the roll-out is incremental and so forth, I'm exploring new territory. Therefore I want to control some of the variables.
2) In the case of a translation into a foreign language, I would at least like to discuss the approach with the translator. Especially since that's a case that naturally lends itself to financial transactions. I do point out that in the cases where I've been approached for translation rights to Acts of the Apostles, I have given them, with no charge. I don't know if the translations ever appeared, although I do know a translation into Russian was at least begun.
3) I'm lazy and don't want to bother updating the website, or even thinking any more about this, before you post the blog entry.
I'm especially sympathetic with the third reason given that it's taken me three years to conduct this interview. Thanks again for the informative answers and good luck with The Pains serialization!
Check out John Sundman's books on wetmachine.com.
As previously announced Creative Commons is participating in Google's Summer of Code as a mentoring organization. Please visit our summer of code ideas page and if you're a student, start working on a proposal.
An over-the-top ideal proposal would include support for RDFa, remixing, open formats and affordances for educational and worldwide (not just wealthy regions) use. Ability to release under an open source license and incorporation of some Creative Commons affordance are necessary. However, a solid proposal is far more important than buzzword compliance. Please read Google's Summer of Code Student FAQ and advice from past participants as you create your proposal. Good luck!
Coincidentally Chris DiBona, Google's Open Source Programs Manager, will be speaking at the next CC Salon San Francsico on May 10, two days after the SoC student proposal submission period ends.
April 26, 2006 has been designated by WIPO member states as "World IP Day." The aim of the day is to "to raise awareness of the role of intellectual property in our daily lives, and to celebrate the contribution made by innovators and artists to the development of societies across the globe."
The theme of this year's event is "the power of ideas as the seedbed for innovation and creativity." As we all know, ideas - at least in copyright - are not subject to protection and hence why they can form the seedbed for innovation and creativity - because they can be borrowed and shared and freely disseminated around the globe. A list of events taking place around the world is provided here. One event which was omitted from this list is the event which took place last night, a gathering in Second Life to discuss the topic "21st Century Creativity in a Copyright World: How Can the Potential Be Realised?".
It was an interesting and wide-ranging discussion - including the forced shut down of Richard Neville's satirical site pretending to be that of the Australian Prime Minister apologising about the Iraq war, the American Edit shut down, the trials and tribulations of securing podcasting licenses from British music rights societies — among other topics.
Really, is there any better way to acknowledge World IP Day than surrounded by people dressed as avatars dressed as green men and devils, and fire hydrants and post boxes? (...and don't you just hate it when you avatar blinks in photos)
The European Commission is investigating a digital libraries initiative that "aims at making European information resources easier and more interesting to use in an online environment." As part of a background paper, the Commission discussed the range of technical, legal, operational and financial challenges such an initiative would encounter and specifically noted that Creative Commons licenses provide an example of "[v]oluntary sharing of content that can have an important place in shaping the common information sphere." (at p13)
As part of its investigation into the feasibility of a virtual European Library, the Commission conducted an online consultation which had questions ranging from topics such as digitisation and online accessibility, orphan works, public domain materials and digital preservation issues. Creative Commons submitted comments, as did some 200 other organizations. CC licensing was mentioned in as many as 60 different comments.
The Commission has now released an overview of the results of its online consulation in English, in French and in German. Creative Commons licensing is mentioned in the overview as one of the suggested measures to enable accessibility to copyrighted materials whilst also respecting the legitimate interests of the author and as a means to render more transparent and widely known the availability of public domain and other material to facilitate its subsequent use.
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 so 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. Update: Thanks to James, the transcript is now available here.
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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."
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
