Weblog
2007 April
Day 4: CC Chile
Well it is now day 4 of the campaign and we’ve raised $7058. Needless to say the momentum that we originally experienced has waned. The importance of this cause however has not and that is why we are not relenting.
The CCi affiliates need to be at the iCommons iSummit to debate and discuss the issues that will undoubtedly effect our global digital commons. These people are active within the movement for the global digital commons and are legal and technology experts. Help us assure that their voice and perspective is heard at this important conference by giving to this campaign.
Over the past couple of days we’ve been highlighting different jurisdictions so that you can get a better understanding of the volunteer project leads. The first story was from Hungary and yesterday’s came from Taiwan.
Today’s story comes to you via South America. Claudio Ruiz (man on the right in the photo and who took this photo) from CC Chile wrote me with the story below and now I’m sharing it with you – properly attributed and all.
A few years back a young designer named Armando Torrealba and his punk-rock band went on tour to the south of Chile. For the tour he designed a very cool image of a panda bear , licensed it under CC BY-NC, and released it so his fans could re-use it and re-mix but not for commercial gains. After he released the image a major retail store in Latin America picked it up and used it on their company website. Torrealba contacted the NGO Derechos Digitales, the institution that supports CC in Chile, and they helped him enforce his rights and the license terms by drafting a cease and desist letter. The company, realizing the stability of the CC licensing infrastructure, immediately removed Armando’s image.
This was an extremely important triumph for the CC Chilean team and a testament to the importance and validity of the CC licensing infrastructure.
In order to continue the global dissemination and the mission of CC it is imperative that we raise this money. We need your help.
No Comments »Day 3: CC Taiwan
Yesterday was another excruciatingly slow day for the campaign. We’ve now raised $6,818. At this rate over three days, we will fall short of our two week goal by a whopping $18,192, which will clearly not enable us to fund scholarships for all of our international volunteers who should be at the iSummit — to learn, share lessons, and plan for the next year of spreading the commons globally.
(Please help us get back on track!)
To give you an idea of the amazing work our volunteers are doing, we’re profiling a jurisdiction project each day of this campaign. Yesterday was CC Hungary. Today we have a very cool post and plea from CC Taiwan.
CC Taiwan: Help Others Go to the Summit!
Creative Commons Taiwan is one of CCi’s jurisdiction projects worldwide. This year CC Taiwan is fortunate to secure her own funding to support some of her members to the iCommons Summit. The works of CC Taiwan, like those of other jurisdiction projects, are carried out at non-profit organizations by volunteers. CC Taiwan understands how difficult it is to get funding to attend the Summit, therefore would like to ask for your help now to support other jurisdiction projects to participate in this year’s meeting.
Here is some background about CC Taiwan. CC Taiwan was officially launched in September 2004 when the Creative Commons Licenses had been ported to Taiwan. Since then we have been working hard with CC license users in Taiwan. “We do a lot of out-reach. We have been giving face-to-face seminars on CC licenses to school teachers, students, indie video producers, musicians, and government agencies,” said Wen-Yin Chou, the out-reach coordinator of CC Taiwan. CC Taiwan maintains a web site and publishes a monthly e-mail newsletter.
(CC Party at Taipei NGO House. Photo by Tyng-Ruey Chuang and released under CC BY-ND 2.5 Taiwan.)
A CC Party was organized in November 2005 to celebrate the anniversary of the launch of CC Taiwan; the press and the public were invited to the three-day extravaganza at the Taipei NGO House to learn about and share the experience of using the Creative Commons Licenses. In January 2007, CC Taiwan hosted the Open & Free: New Enterprise in the Information Age international workshop in Taipei.
(The logo of Creative Commons Taiwan.)
As a project, CC Taiwan has her own logo. The two Chinese characters at the left of the CC-in-a-circle mark mean Create and Use, which hopefully convey the share-and-remix spirit of Creative Commons. Representative CC-licensed publications from Taiwan can be found at CC Taiwan’s web site.
“People need tools in order to share their works. CC Licenses are a flexible set of legal tools allowing people to easily share, remix, and share again their works,” said Yi-Hsuan Lin, the legal lead of CC Taiwan. CC Taiwan recently works with the National Digital Archives Program (NDAP) of Taiwan to release more than three-million items in their Union Catalogs to the public under the Creative Commons licenses. (For samplers of the items in the Union Catalogs, look here and here.) The Union Catalogs has been being built on digitized cultural artifacts contributed by major collection holders including the National Palace Museum, National Taiwan University, and Academia Sinica. These content holders believe that, by releasing the Union Catalogs with their metadata under CC licenses, they can make this massive and diverse collection of cultural resources more accessible to people in Taiwan and worldwide.
“Creative Commons Taiwan is very glad to work with collection holders such as NDAP to help them license their collections to the public, so that they will have a greater impact,” said Tyng-Ruey Chuang, the public lead of CC Taiwan. There are success stories made possible by CCi’s jurisdiction projects worldwide in using CC licenses to free up cultural and social resources. “The last two iCommons Summits were just incredible,” said Tyng-Ruey, “we learned so much from one another. We are eager to meet other jurisdiction project teams again this year. Please help them get there!“
Also see CC Taiwan’s iSummit06 description and report to the iSummit (pdf).
Creative Commons Taiwan is hosted and supported by the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and has been funded in part by grants from the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office, the Ministry of Education, the Council for Cultural Affairs, and the National Science Council of Taiwan.
No Comments »Sony launches CC-enabled video site
Sony has launched eyeVio, a CC-enabled video sharing site, which looks like a very slick (massive use of DHTML, AJAX, rounded corners, and other Web 2.0 techniques) and Japanese language only YouTube.
eyeVio enables choosing any of the six main CC licenses when uploading a video.
Here’s the John Perry Barlow/Jack Valenti video played at the Creative Commons launch on December 16, 2002, embedding courtesy of eyeVio.
Jack Valenti died last week. Creative Commons founder and CEO Lawrence Lessig paid respects on his blog.
No Comments »Day 2: CC Hungary
Day one of our two week/$50,000 Creative Commons International affiliate iSummit scholarship campaign exceeded expectations, but yesterday was a big letdown. We’ve raised $6,618 in two days. At this rate we will not be able to end the campaign early and will end up $3,674 short.
As promised, we’re going to profile Creative Commons International affiliates each day of the campaign. (Yesterday we cheated with a group photo, perhaps the poor results were deserved.) These are the volunteers your contributions fund scholarships for. After reading a profile or two, we think you’ll understand why giving now is the most leveraged way you can help grow the commons.
We’ll start with CC Hungary. I asked Bodó Balázs, one of the project leads, to provide some background and and update on what CC Hungary is up to now.
CC Hungary has become central to discussions about copyright in Hungary. Bodó and fellow project leads István Szakadát and Attila Kelényi have given dozens of invited talks about copyright throughout the country in the last two years, reaching audiences in education, arts, business and government. The CC Hungary mailing list has attracted discussants from across the spectrum, including advocates, artists, lawyers, and collecting society representatives. This forum has become a key place for Hungarians to trade views on copyright and digital media issues.
Recently CC Hungary gave its most exciting presentation yet. Vint Cerf, one of the many ‘fathers’ of the Internet, chief evangelist at Google, held a public lecture in Hungary on April 2. Creative Commons Hungary was invited to present the CC licences before the talk to the thousands of people who showed up to the talk.
A highly promising upcoming development is involvement with MediaWave, an international independent film and music festival in Hungary since 1991. Creative Commons Hungary was invited to assist in releasing the films in the MediaWave Archives under CC licences, and we will have a week long presence at the festival helping filmmakers, musicians to learn about CC and how CC licences can help them gain access to global audiences.
Now for a bit of background.
(First we interrupt for a very important pledge break.)
Note the byline on the Creative Commons Hungary website:
Használd! Alkoss! Gyarapitsd!
Bodó says this motto appears in many Hungarian schoolrooms. Its meaning, roughly:
Do, create, enrich, and the country will arise.
This is adapted from the last line of a poem called HUSZT by Ferenc Kölcsey:
Bús düledékeiden, Husztnak romvára megállék;
Csend vala, felleg alól szállt fel az éjjeli hold.
Szél kele most, mint sír szele kél; s a csarnok elontott
Oszlopi közt lebegő rémalak inte felém.
És mond: Honfi, mit ér epedő kebel e romok ormán?
Régi kor árnya felé visszamerengni mit ér?
Messze jövendővel komolyan vess öszve jelenkort;
Hass, alkoss, gyarapíts: s a haza fényre derűl!
English translation:
I stand on the sad crumbling walls of the Huszt Castle ruins. Night moon has arisen from the clouds, silent was the world The wind starts to blow, like wind from the grave; from the depths of the hall a ghost comes to me and asks me: my friend what are you looking for among these sad ruins? Why are you looking to days long-long gone? Look to the future and measure the present with by what you wish to achieve Do, create, enrich, and the country will arise.
Bodó explains that the CC Hungary motto is actually a remix of Kölcsey’s lines transformed to have a definitive subject instead of an indefinite one.
The poem comes from the early 1800s, a time of intense nationalism and modernization in the history of Hungary. Perhaps this is stretching a bit, but it seems that Creative Commons, particularly its international component, is a manifestation of analogous trends in the 2000s: globalization and digital networks. These trends have made participation in “do, create, enrich” accessible to the masses and without respect to country — humanity will arise.
Playing a key role in ensuring this dream is fulfilled — Creative Commons legal and technical tools and members of the community around Creative Commons, our international affiliate volunteers in particular.
(Please give.)
L-R: Hal Abelson (CC board member), Syb Groeneveld (CC Netherlands), Bodó Balázs (CC Hungary) at iSummit 2005. Photo by Karl Jonsson (CC Sweden), licensed under CC BY.
(Support scholarships for volunteers to attend iSummit 2007!)
No Comments »Creative Commons at Maker Faire
On May 19 and 20, Creative Commons will be at Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA. The event, organized and hosted by the good people at Make Magazine, “celebrates arts, crafts, engineering, science projects and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset.” Come visit us at our booth and learn more about what we’re up to.
No Comments »Chicago Sun-Times on Flickr
Yesterday’s Chicago Sun-Times had a good article about Flickr that emphasized the value of Creative Commons licensing.
No Comments »It’s a magnificent library of stock art. The big point of Flickr is to allow photographers of all skill levels to share their pictures with the world. And the folks behind Flickr back this concept up with a simple but brilliant feature: at the photographers’ discretion, Flickr can automatically attach a Creative Commons license to each photo. Creative Commons allows photographers to give you certain useful rights to their pictures while retaining other rights for themselves; the creators can encourage free sharing without actually releasing their work into the public domain, if they so choose.
Another great Steve Jurvetson photo reused under a CC license
Steve Jurvetson let us know about a very cool recent reuse of one of his CC-licensed photos. This incredible macro shot of an ant was used to accompany an article on UCSF’s website about chitin and allergic inflammation.
Photo: Steve Jurvetson, licensed under CC BY
Jurvetson’s photography has been used under CC licenses many times in print and on TV. As he says in this discussion about Creative Commons on Flickr:
No Comments »I use a simple attribution license which for me is just perfect. It maximizes the freedom for reuse while maintaining a channel for attention back to this photoblog.
And it really works. I never imagined that my photos would be used by anyone, and certainly not in the unusual places that they have so far… including: Maxim Magazine, Science magazine, on TV with the Charlie Rose Show, the cover of a board game, and numerous textbooks, even one for the blind (go figure!)… Here are some examples.
Day 1
It has been 24 hours since the launch of the CCi Scholarship Funding Campaign and the response has been incredible. $6,366 has been raised so far thanks to you! At this rate we’ll finish the campaign 6 days before the 2 week time period ends.
There are several different ways you can participate and support CC. One way would be to visit the CC Store and check out one of our popular CC T-shirts. One of my personal favorites is the CC Logo shirt. Thank you again MikeBlogs for this amazing photo (CC BY).
The reason that we are attempting this feat is to enable as many of the CCi Affiliates as possible to attend the critical iCommons iSummit in June. These dedicated volunteers have played a large role in the momentum behind CC and the global digital commons. And for this work we are forever thankful.
Help us fund these people and all the new additions that we’ve welcomed into the CC family over the past year.
No Comments »
World IP Day
World Intellectual Property Day is observed annually on April 26. “Encouraging Creativity” is the theme for 2007.
For this day we’ve produced a flyer addressing how Creative Commons encourages creativity. You can download the PDF or read the text on our wiki.
Here’s the closing paragaph:
In sum, the Creative Commons toolset encourages and enables participation in creativity by everyone, not only those with access to copyright lawyers. This is as it should be in modern democracies, where the tools for expression and creativity are available to everyone as everyday consumer goods.
In the spirit of World IP Day, please support our campaign to fund this summer’s worldwide gathering of Creative Commons International volunteer legal affiliates.
No Comments »CCi Affiliate Scholarship Campaign launches today
Two years ago, iCommons established the yearly iSummit conference as a way to bring together the thinkers, innovators, and pioneers of the “Open” movement.
This year’s iSummit (taking place in Dubrovnik, Croatia from June 15th through 17th) will bring together more than 250 key players for two days of intense discussion and debate about our digital freedoms and the future of the Internet. It is critical to assure that a truly global legal perspective is represented at this important conference.
Creative Commons International affiliates are crucial to the success of the iSummit and of Creative Commons globally. The iSummit is the one opportunity each year for these dedicated volunteers drawn from universities and cultural institutes to learn from each other face to face and plan for the challenges and opportunities facing the movement in the next year. Enabling these volunteers to participate in the iSummit is truly the most leveraged way to support Creative Commons at this time.
In order for Creative Commons to provide affiliates with scholarships to attend this critical conference, we need your help in raising $50,000 within the next two weeks. This is a daunting task, but we strongly believe that you, our community, will help us reach this goal.
Please give to the fund. All of our usual cool premiums are available.
To help, Digital Garage, a major sponsor of iSummit 2006, is matching the first $20,000 that is contributed.
This campaign will end when we have raised $50,000, or in two weeks, whichever comes first. There will be updates from our international affiliates blogged each day of the campaign.
If your company is interested in contributing matching funds or if you have questions about the campaign, please contact our Development Coordinator, Melissa Reeder, at melissa@creativecommons.org.
No Comments »
