CC Newsletter

• There’s been a lot of discussion and debate recently about CC’s NonCommercial and NoDerivatives terms.

• A recent dispute involving Wikimedia demonstrates CC licenses' ability to withstand legal scrutiny.

• If you work with K-12 students in the US (or if you are one), then you’ll want to know about the Engage 2012 student video competition.

• Ten years after the release of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, OA advocates recently released updated recommendations in support of open access around the world, touching on areas including policy, licensing, sustainability, and advocacy.

• After more than two years of hard work, the CC China Mainland 3.0 licenses are ready for use.

• We end on a sad note by remembering Lee Dirks, a strategist at Microsoft Research Connections and friend of the open access movement.

We rely on our supporters to continue our work enabling stories like those above. 

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Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by the generous support of organizations including the Center for the Public Domain, Google, LuLu, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla Corporation, The Omidyar Network, Red Hat, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as members of the public (you!).

• We've just posted Draft 2 of Version 4.0 of the CC license suite. Learn what's new in 4.0 and what issues are still being discussed.

• Have you tried CC's new license chooser yet? Jonathan from our web team explains the factors that went into the redesign.

• July was a busy month for CC and the Peer 2 Peer University, as we worked together to lay the groundwork for a School of Open. Find out what we've been up to and what's next.

• Looking for curriculum about CC? Check out CC Aotearoa New Zealand's excellent collection of resources.

• An interesting new research paper explores the role of open licensing in the democratization of music.

• CC community support intern Natalya Berenshteyn writes about her work developing materials to support our international affiliate network.

• In this fascinating interview, CC Korea's DaYe Jung discusses music and copyright law in Korea.

Help Us Build a School of Open

The School of Open is a collaboration between Creative Commons and P2PU (Peer 2 Peer University). Its aim is to provide easily digestible educational exercises, resources, and professional development courses that help individuals and institutions learn about and employ open tools, such as the CC licenses.

Why build a School of Open? Universal access to and participation in research, education, and culture is made possible by openness, but not enough people know what it means or how to take advantage of it. We imagine artists, educators, learners, scientists, archivists, and other creators improving their fields via the use of open tools and materials.

Participate in our upcoming events and find out how you can get involved with the School of Open.

Read more.

Elinor Ostrom
Holger Motzkau 2010 / Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons
CC BY-SA

Honoring Elinor Ostrom

A collective sigh of sadness went around the Creative Commons community last month when we heard that Elinor Ostrom passed away. Elinor is greatly admired for her pioneering studies on the governance of common-pool resources (the Commons) and collective action across the fields of economics, social science, politics and policy.

Her seminal book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, was published in 1990; however, Elinor’s work on common property began in the 1960s. Her studies showed that “ordinary people are capable of creating rules and institutions that allow for the sustainable and equitable management of shared resources,” and resources held in the commons may reduce potential over-use or under-investment, and so enable sustainability. At the time of publication it debunked the conventional thinking that ‘common-pool’ finite resources required ‘top down’ regulation or private ownership to maximize their utility and prevent depletion.

Read more.

Please Help Us Free Bassel, Open Source Developer and CC Volunteer

On March 15, 2012, Bassel Khartabil was detained in a wave of arrests in the Mazzeh district of Damascus. Since then, his family has received no official explanation for his detention or information regarding his whereabouts. However, his family has recently learned from previous detainees at the security branch of Kafer Sousa, Damascus, that Bassel is being held at this location.

Bassel Khartabil, a Palestinian-born Syrian, 31, is a respected computer engineer specializing in open source software development, the type of contributions the Internet is built upon. He launched his career ten years ago in Syria, working as a technical director for a number of local companies on cultural projects like restoring Palmyra and Forward Syria Magazine.

Bassel Khartabil has been unjustly detained for nearly four months without trial or any legal charges being brought against him.

Read more.

• Last week at the World Open Educational Resources (OER) Congress, UNESCO member states unanimously approved the 2012 Paris OER Declaration. Read Cable’s wrap-up and the full declaration. For more OER news, catch up on the latest in OER from Poland.

• There have been several exciting developments in open data over the past month.

• Governments, academic publishers, and the public are exploring more ways to make research freely accessible.

• You only have six days left to vote for your favorite Why Open Education Matters video.

• CCHits is a website promoting Creative Commons–licensed music. Meet creator Jon Spriggs and find out why he started CCHits.

• Share your favorite sharing stories with Shareable and you could win $1000 in credit for services like Airbnb and Zipcar.

• Creative Commons Korea hosted an art happening in which composers turned family stories into music. Check out the music and read CC Korea’s English-language coverage.

• Attention musicians: it’s time for the fourth annual Free! Music! Contest. Enter your CC-licensed works and celebrate free music.

Report from "What the World Bank's Open Access Policy Means for Development" panel

The World Bank hosted an event called What the World Bank’s Open Access Policy Means for Development. Participants included Peter Suber from Harvard University, Michael Carroll from American University (Mike is on the Board of Directors at Creative Commons), and Cyril Muller and Adam Wagstaff from the World Bank. The discussion was timely given the Bank’s recently-announced Open Access Policy and Open Knowledge Repository. The World Bank’s Open Access Policy requires that all research outputs and knowledge products published by the Bank be licensed Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) as a default. The conversation revolved around the impact and potential for World Bank research — and open access in general — for development in countries around the world. For example, how will access and reuse of research under an open access policy create opportunities to solve large global challenges such as climate change and hunger? Read more.

Mike Linksvayer by Joi
CC BY

A big thanks to Mike Linksvayer

Many of you know Mike Linksvayer, the first CTO and then Vice President of Creative Commons. Mike started at Creative Commons back in 2003 (almost a decade ago!), and since then has shepherded CC through a period of great expansion, providing leadership and support for efforts across various initiatives and around the world. He has also been a great help to all of us this past year, during the transition from part-time to full-time CEO. We can not begin to name everything that Mike has done, not only for Creative Commons, but for free and open culture generally, so we’ll just name a few, with the caveat that, if ever there was a jack of all trades, he is Mike Linksvayer. Since 2003, Mike has helped to… Read more.

We now welcome artists to begin working on artwork for the art competition of the Liberated Pixel Cup! Zombies, potions, spaceships, werewolves, whatever! We're looking forward to seeing what contributions you can build to match the style guide. On that note, one of the primary goals of Liberated Pixel Cup was to create a clear style that many people could collaborate on. We're happy to announce that that style guide is released, along with some base assets to build off of and a fun "walkaround" demo that shows how the tiles can fit together. Read more.

• CC Costa Rica represented us at WIPO for the 9th session of the Committee on Development and Intellectual Property (CDIP) and made a statement on the public domain. Read it here.

• COMMUNIA also explores the role of the digital public domain in its final report. For four years, COMMUNIA gathered over 50 members from academia and the CC community to research, promote, and preserve the digital public domain.

• More than 25,000 people signed the U.S. petition to support public access to publicly funded scientific research.

• The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and UNESCO have published a report documenting government open educational resources (OER) policies.

• CC Sweden designed a fantastic poster explaining Creative Commons and wants you to help translate it to other languages.

• The Walters Museum recently uploaded 19,000 images to Wikimedia under CC BY-SA and in the public domain.

• In education, the Saylor Foundation has expanded its $20,000 open textbook challenge to include the creation of new texts under CC BY. Interested academics may submit a brief statement about their proposed text.

• Lastly, we hosted a successful conference for grantees of the $500 million U.S. Department of Labor's Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program (TAACCCT) program. Grantees learned how to implement the CC BY license requirement of the grant for their educational materials.

The Liberated Pixel Cup: an epic contest for gaming freedom

We’re pleased to announce the launch of the Liberated Pixel Cup, a free-as-in-freedom game authoring competition being launched in cooperation between Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation, Mozilla, and OpenGameArt! Liberated Pixel Cup is a two-part competition: make a bunch of awesome free culture licensed artwork, and program a bunch of free software games that use it. Hopefully many cool projects can come out of this… but that will only happen if people like you get involved! Technically the project will run in three phases. Read more.

World Bank announces Open Access Policy and launches Open Knowledge Repository under Creative Commons

The World Bank has announced a new Open Access Policy! Effective July 1, 2012, the Open Access Policy requires that all research outputs and knowledge products published by the Bank be licensed Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) as a default. As part of the first phase of this policy, the Bank launched a new Open Knowledge Repository with more than 2,000 books, articles, reports and research papers under CC BY. Read more.

In March, Creative Commons, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Open Society Institute launched the Why Open Education Matters Video Competition. The goal of the competition is to raise awareness of Open Educational Resources (OER) and solicit short, creative videos that help explain what Open Educational Resources are and how they can be beneficial for teachers, students, and schools everywhere around the world. There’s been lots of interest in the competition, and we wanted to remind you that the deadline to submit your video is June 5, 2012. Read more.

• The Austrian government, Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research, Italian Chamber of Deputies, and Harvard Library released their data using CC tools.

• Nature Publishing Group also released publication data for more than 450,000 articles using CC0.

• Musician Dan Bull released “Sharing is Caring” into the public domain using CC0. The song reached #9 on the UK independent chart.

• CC's CEO, Cathy Casserly, was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Open University for her contributions to open education.

• The Data Journalism Handbook, a collaborative effort to help journalists find and use data for better news reporting led by the Open Knowledge Foundation, was published under a CC BY-SA license.

• We launched the Creative Commons 3.0 Switzerland ported license suite. Huge thanks to the CC Switzerland team for their hard work and dedication in perfecting the Swiss ported licenses.

• We are hosting a workshop on the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) at this year's Content in Context conference as part of the Metadata Lab on educational metadata adoption.

• Lastly, we are seeking a Project Coordinator for Science and Data. Please forward to all qualified and interested folks!