Moving Image Contest deadline December 31st!

Neeru Paharia, December 18th, 2003

GET CREATIVE!

Enter the Creative Commons Moving Image Contest.

Make a 2-minute moving image that describes Creative Commons’ mission.

Win a computer, a digital video camera, or an iPod.

An amazing panel of judges will select winners.

Please read the official rules.

Deadline for entries is December 31st, 2003

Reticulum Rex

Matt Haughey, December 16th, 2003

At our first anniversary party Sunday night, we unveiled a new movie called Reticulum Rex. For those of you that missed the event, the movie can now be seen here, and it acts as a continuation of the story started in our first short, Get Creative.

A big thanks to everyone that attended the party, supported us throughout the past year, and a special thanks to Ryan Junell, Christopher Lydon, and Benjamen Walker for their incredible work in creating Reticulum Rex.

Free music at LegalTorrents

Matt Haughey, December 11th, 2003

LegalTorrents is a new site offering 5Gb of electronic music from a variety of labels, all licensed under Creative Commons. What makes this site unique is the large downloads are shared among everyone downloading, thanks to the P2P technology of BitTorrent. Once you download a client and load up a music torrent file, you’ll be downloading the file from everyone that has downloaded the file, and as you gather data others will be downloading from you. It’s an incredible technology meant to share large file downloads like these music archives and things such as linux distributions. The technology also has a checkered past due to its use for sharing illegal files, hence the name of the site, LegalTorrents.

Subscribe to Free Content

Glenn Otis Brown, December 11th, 2003

In case you missed it among our other many cool re-design features this fall, I’d strongly recommended subscribing to the RSS feeds for Common Content (RSS here) and the Internet Archive (RSS here).

Put them in your favorite blog-/news-reader, and you’ve got a fresh batch of free culture waiting for you every morning.

Can CC Kill Spam?

Glenn Otis Brown, December 11th, 2003

Well, maybe not on its own. But now that I’ve gotten your attention with that spammish subject line, you might want to check out John Henshaw’s tips for avoiding spam at Family Resource, licensed under a Creative Commons license — which means you can copy and send them to everyone in your address book.

Thanks to Common Content‘s snazzy RSS feed for this.

PD Photo

Matt Haughey, December 10th, 2003

This week’s featured content is PD Photo, a new photo archive containing thousands of photos released into the public domain. Photographer Jon Sullivan has opened up his personal archives of thousands of photos and made them free for re-use. His favorites are a good place to start if you’re looking for high quality outdoor and landscape photos to use in web, print, or post designs.

Ingenious use of the public domain

Matt Haughey, December 10th, 2003

Customized Classics takes several classics of literature from the public domain, and weaves names of your choosing directly into the story to create custom one-off printings of your books. It’s a clever (and commercial) use of freely available works.

PARTY — You are invited!

Glenn Otis Brown, December 9th, 2003

Why: One Year Anniversary of the Creative Commons tools and licenses.

When: Sunday, December 14, 6:00 – 9:00 pm.

Where: 111 Minna Gallery, 111 Minna Street, San Francisco, CA. (View Map).

What:

• An address by Lawrence Lessig
• The sequel to the first Creative Commons animated hit, “Get Creative“
• Special guests
• CC Tunes
• Appetizers & Drinks

Space is limited, so RSVP, please! — commonsbash@yahoo.com

Project Gutenberg hits 10k, events in San Francisco

Matt Haughey, December 9th, 2003

In celebration of Project Gutenberg‘s 10,000th book release, founder Michael Hart and CEO Greg Newby are planning a series of events to commemorate the milestone. Starting tomorrow with a lecture at the Golden Gate Club and finishing up this week with an appearance on TechTV.

Along with the annoucement they’re offering all 10,000 books as a downloadable DVD disc image, ready for burning.

French Creative Commons

Matt Haughey, December 5th, 2003

We’ve recently announced the launch of the iCommons project in France. Like the other concurrent iCommons projects, there’s a mailing list, a proposed translation into French law, and a retranslation to explain the changes. If you understand French law and/or live in France and want to help shape the extension of Creative Commons, feel free to sign up for the mailing list and contribute.