CC Newsletter

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• Creative Commons Qatar launched last week at a reception at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha that featured the work of more than 20 local artists.
• We improved the CC legal interface on our license deeds. Check out the changes and give us feedback!
• We talked with Pete Forsyth and the Wikimedia Public Policy Initiative about open education and policy. Pete will also be on the panel for CC Salon SF next week (see below).
• After 1,200 screenings of his CC-licensed documentary, "An Island," director Vincent Moon launched his new label, petites planètes, under CC BY-NC.
• The Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) adopted a university-wide open educational resources (OER) policy with CC BY as the default license for university material.
• Speaking of OER, come to our next salon on June 13! CC Salon SF will feature a panel discussion exploring the ways we can facilitate the desire to improve learning. Including CC CEO Cathy Casserly, the panel will consist of members from the Wikimedia Foundation's Public Policy Initiative, Libresoft, Wiki Strategies, and the Urban School. For those who can’t make it, the event will be livestreamed.

March may be over, but the madness isn't! CC is helping to shape Japan relief efforts, moving offices, and playing an important role in open government.

Japan relief efforts use Creative Commons

Regardless of CC related efforts, we want you to do what you can to help Japan. But we also think it's pretty amazing that a number of great relief efforts are using Creative Commons licenses, and you can contribute to them. OLIVE is a Wikipedia-like site that provides much-needed information for quake survivors in various languages. With thousands of people displaced from their homes in Japan, many are surviving in make-shift homes and shelters, with scant resources. OLIVE provides practical and creative ways on how to best utilize available resources, such as how to stay warm in a cardboard house. You can help by contributing, editing, or translating articles on OLIVE – all available for reuse under CC BY. Read more about other CC relief efforts.

CC headquarters moves to Mountain View, California!

New CC Office by Creative Commons / CC BY

Spring is a time for change, as evidenced by our office move. We're not leaving our hearts in San Francisco, however; we're taking them plus our innovative spirits with us to Mountain View, California. As of April 1, the CC headquarters will be located in downtown Mountain View to be closer to all the activity brewing in Silicon Valley. Read more.

State of Play: Public Sector Information in the United States

As part of our blog series for the European Public Sector Information Platform (ePSIplatform) on the role of Creative Commons in supporting the re-use of public sector information, we have researched and published the State of Play: Public Sector Information in the United States. Beth Noveck, former United States deputy CTO of open government and now a Professor of Law at New York Law School, provides a great overview, noting that it is “an excellent report on open data in the United States” and “provides a concise and accurate primer (with footnotes) on the legal and policy framework for open government data in the US.” Read more.

In other news:

• Have an idea for a CC project? Learn how to develop a proposal and apply for funding at the P2PU "Getting your CC project funded" course! Deadline to apply is April 13.
• The annual Open Education Conference is calling for research proposals by May 13.
• Safe Creative, a Spain-based global intellectual property registry that allows users to publicly assert and identify their rights over a work, now enables creators to donate a portion of their sales to Creative Commons.
• CC talked with BCcampus on open educaton and policy. BCcampus is the institution that provides educational technology and online learning support to British Columbia’s 25 public colleges and universities.
• CC CEO Cathy Casserly receives the President's Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence.
• Firefox 4 was officially released by our awesome friends at Mozilla.
• NYTimes best-selling author Cory Doctorow talked up CC in a recent feature by the BBC: "How free translates to business survival."
• Lastly, we are hosting a CC Salon Palo Alto on Open Services Innovation. The April 25 event is free and open to all, but advance RSVP is required, so reserve your spot now!

Banner based on illustration by Jennifer Chong – CC BY 2.0.

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Where our $ came from in 2010

In an exercise in transparency and graphic design, we illustrate the source of the hands that fed us, including yours. We’re a nonprofit organization that happily provides our tools for free, and we rely on you, our international community of users and advocates to help us continue our work. With so many worthy causes in the world vying for your support, we are so grateful to all who have kept CC afloat and going strong for the past 8 years. We’d love to see these numbers grow, just as CC license adoption and use of our tools has grown steadily since 2002. Check out the full visual break-down of 2010 funds.

Open Attribute, a ridiculously simple way to attribute CC-licensed works on the web

For evidence that CC tools are laying the groundwork for a more open web, look no further than Open Attribute, “a suite of tools that makes it ridiculously simple for anyone to copy and paste the correct attribution for any CC licensed work.” The Open Attribute team (which includes our super stellar CTO Nathan Yergler) launched browser add-ons for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome last month. Thanks to the magic of CC REL, the add-ons pull the metadata around a CC-licensed work to produce a formatted attribution that users can copy and paste wherever they need to. Learn more about how it works.

Have your own Creative Commons project? Learn how to get it funded

We are never short on good ideas, but how many of those ideas actually turn into something tangible? Now’s your chance to get serious with “Getting your CC project funded,” a free, online course set to run in April. The course consists of a series of workshops and seminars that will take you through the steps from an initial idea to having a finished project proposal for submission, including assistance in identifying and finding funding bodies and collaborations relevant for your project. You provide the idea; the course provides the guidance to turn it into a proposal that can’t be refused. Learn more.

Cathy Casserly by Joi Ito / CC BY

“One of the most important moments in the history of Creative Commons happened on the day the Supreme Court upheld (incorrectly, in my view, but let’s leave that alone) the Copyright Term Extension Act in Eldred v. Ashcroft. After reading the decision, I had my head in my hands, buried in sadness, when my assistant reminded me that I had a 10am meeting with two people from the Hewlett Foundation. This was exactly one month after we had launched Creative Commons.

Cathy and Mike had heard about the Supreme Court’s decision. They recognized I wouldn’t be in much of a mood to chat. So they launched right into the reason for the meeting: The Hewlett Foundation had decided to help launch Creative Commons with a grant of $1 million dollars.

I won’t say that after I heard that news, I forgot about the Supreme Court. But from that moment on, it was much more important to me to prove Hewlett’s faith right than to worry about what the Supreme Court had gotten wrong. And I was especially keen to get to know these two people who understood our mission long before most had even recognized the problem that CC was meant to solve.”

We welcome Cathy and thank Joi for his fruitful two years as CEO. We are equally excited that Joi will remain Chair of the CC Board, and look to both Cathy’s and Joi’s strong leadership to move CC forward in 2011.

In other news:

• CC talked with Mark Surman from the Mozilla Foundation about the connection between Mozilla and CC, and CC’s role in the broader digital ecosystem. CC also talked with the Maine Department of Education about how they are investing their educational grants in OER.
• Journalist Dan Gillmor reflected on the challenges and rewards of publishing “Mediactive” under CC.
• CERN Library and the University of Michigan Library released hundreds of thousands of bibliographic records into the public domain using CC0.
• CC filed comments in the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Inquiry on Copyright Policy, Creativity, and Innovation in the Internet Economy.
• In an effort to balance legally sound terminology with culturally palatable translations, CC Affiliates in the Spanish-speaking and Arabic-speaking worlds have harmonized the language in their license deeds.
• Finally, CC turned eight last month. In celebration, “Building on the Past” creator re-released his video under CC BY. Watch the video and read about Justin Cone’s motivations.

3taps Supports Creative Commons with a Matching Challenge!

Today, we'd like to turn your attention to 3taps, a new startup that makes sifting through classified ads a whole lot easier. 3taps is supporting our fall fundraising campaign with a $3000 matching challenge! That means if you donate now, 3taps will match your donation dollar for dollar — but only for a limited time. Read on to learn how two friends who once worked at the Federal Reserve see the powerful potential of the CC Public Domain Mark and donate today to have your gift automatically doubled!

Say you're looking for a 2002 Saab Viggen—a rare car that could take hours to find if you were to have to comb through every Craigslist, eBay, and Hemmings listing site. A new web service called 3taps, founded by Karen Gifford and Greg Kidd in San Francisco, is making searching for products and services a whole lot easier: it indexes factual data from different sites and neatly spits out relevant search results on their web, iPhone, and iPad interfaces. You can just type "2002 Saab Viggen" into the search box and, within seconds, have a full list of search results from the over 6.7 million posts made each day that the software sorts through.

Gifford and Kidd both worked at the Federal Reserve and later met working at a financial consulting company. When their large, global clients would run up against systems and data incompatibility issues, they recognized that there was a massive amount of financial data out there but no central database. Thinking about the issue of data management sparked many ideas for Gifford and Kidd and eventually led to the idea of 3taps. While searching for a car seems like a completely different function than searching for aggregated financial data, Gifford and Kidd explain that the concept of having snippets of public information easily available is the same. "The idea is to be ubiquitous," Kidd says. "Everyone should have equal access, open access, and clarity about what's out there that is not protected by copyright."

3taps aims to make the data currently kept in silos more accessible by clearly marking it with the public domain mark once it is located. "We're using the CC public domain mark to bring clarity to the idea that facts are in the public domain and not protected by copyright. Equal access to pricing information is a public good. We see the public domain mark as really important in clarifying what information belongs to the public."

That is one of the many reasons 3taps supports CC. They are showing their support with this matching challenge and we are inviting everyone to make the most of 3taps's generosity by donating to CC now to have your gift doubled.

Why 3taps supports CC:

"3taps indexes factual data about items offered for exchange, like price, quantity and item description. Facts like these are important public information that let people find the best deal on the item they want. There has been a lot of confusion about the status of factual data on the Internet, and confusion in this area inhibits innovation. Creative Commons' newly-released Public Domain Mark is an important tool for bringing clarity to this area. It couldn't have come at a better time for those interested in collaboration in the sphere of data."
— Karen Gifford

Check out the super-cool science-themed CC shirt now available in the CC store. The world-famous web comic XKCD was gracious enough to let us re-use a variation on a classic cartoon, and it's all yours for $20. 

Microsoft has supported us for the past five years and has given again to this year's fundraising campaign, saying the company "is very proud to continue its support of this important organization and the crucial public resource it makes available" and encouraging other technology companies to do the same.

Amazon #1 bestseller, sci-fi anthology "Machine of Death," goes Creative Commons. Read why its authors chose to do so.

Apply for a 2011 Google Policy Fellowship with Creative Commons — open to undergraduate, graduate, and law students interested in Internet and technology policy. Find out more and apply.

Read stories of people and projects using Creative Commons in education, government, and data, and add your own to contribute to our case studies project.

Our fall fundraising campaign is fully underway, and we'd like to start off this month's newsletter by encouraging all of you who use or support Creative Commons to donate today so we can continue to provide you with great tools for sharing and remixing on the web!

Stay up to date with CC news by subscribing to our weblog and following us on Twitter.

Our annual fundraising campaign has launched! Help us reach our $550,000 goal!

Creative Commons is recruiting a legion of superheroes to help us raise money for our fall fundraising campaign. We already have an all-star team of leaders in education, science, and entertainment who are sharing their stories and advocating for openness on the web and beyond. They include Neeru Khosla, founder of CK12 Foundation and champion of open education; Salvatore Mele and Jens Vigen, pioneering open access to physics data from CERN and the Large Hadron Collider; writer Robin Sloan; and open video advocate Elizabeth Stark. Join the legion of Creative Commons Superheroes. Donate today.

Neeru Khosla, Creative Commons Superhero

Textbooks are like dinosaurs: clunky, archaic, and not readily available. That's why Neeru Khosla founded CK12 Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to lowering the cost of educational materials and making them more freely accessible around the world. Khosla recruited teachers from all over America to help write CK12 textbooks and published all the material under Creative Commons licenses.

By August 2009, she had a complete repertoire of original high school science, engineering, and math course materials available on her web site. "We distributed it online so that anybody could use it," she says. "If you can access the Internet, you can download as much of the book as you need." Khosla also encourages the remixing of educational materials — instead of schlepping through pedantic chapters of a heavyweight hardcover, she wants teachers to have the freedom to mix, match, and redesign content and build on what teachers from prior years may have left behind. "Too often I've seen teachers leave the institution, forcing the next teacher to start fresh. If you want to customize content and mix and match content, an open model makes much more sense than having copyrighted material." Join Khosla in the legion of CC Superheroes. Donate today.

In other news:

Esther Wojcicki, an award-winning teacher, is CC's new board Vice Chair and will focus on openness and innovation in learning and education. Read the full story.

The US Department of Education released an official guide to how open educational resources (OER) can improve teaching and learning in higher education. Read the full story.

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

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