Weblog
2007 October
The Web is Agreement
Detail from Paul Downey’s wonderful web architecture comic poster, licensed under CC Attribution:
Full poster:
There are a bunch of gems in the poster. Explore and remix.
1 Comment »Red Hat Shares the Love
Red Hat is now offering an opportunity to learn more about Linux and support CC at the same time! If you sign up for a Red Hat Linux course eligible for a promotional giveaway, you can waive that giveaway in exchange for a donation to CC. Thank you Red Hat for promoting sharing in so many ways.
No Comments »Which one is Bucky?
Bucky Jonson is the name of the band that drives the funky soul behind the multi-platinum Grammy winning band the Black Eyed Peas. The band is actually made up of Printz Board, George Pajon Jr., Tim Izo and Keith Harris. A few months ago they stepped out from the shadows with their oh-so-appropriately named solo album “The Band Behind the Front….”
Now for the real news: The album’s individual solo tracks along with many outtakes have been made available with a BY-NC license at ccMixter.org/buckyjonson.
Bucky represents some of the best soul/funk virtuoso musicians on the scene today so it’s no surprise that these recording are the cleanest, best originally performed samples ever put into the Creative Commons Sample Pool (which is approaching the 50,000 sample count). There was so much material delivered from the band it took a small army of volunteers from the ccMixter community to chop the tracks into bite-size remix-able loops. Over 205 MB of un-cut tracks and the loops are available for free download here.
The release of these tracks is part of an ongoing relationship between CC and BBE Music that includes the DJ Vadim remix contest and subsequent release of Vadmin’s album into the Commons. The winners of that contest were put onto the “Soundcatchers Extras” album along side Vadim and other members of the worldwide consortium of musicians and DJ operating under the banner of the One-self Collective.
The best remixes posted to ccMixter of Bucky and Vadim continue to be culled for other One-self projects including live dates around the world, soundtracks for videos and playing them on the BBE radio shows in London and Spain.
No Comments »Tracey: Re-Fragmented
The Tracey Fragments, the latest film from Canadian director Bruce McDonald, follows the story of a 15-year-old girl (Ellen Page) who has “lost her little brother and sets out on a desperate journey to find him”. While the film itself looks absolutely phenomenal, Tracey: Re-Fragmented, the film’s online counterpart, is where the project really begins to take shape for those in the CC-community. From The Tracey Fragments:
Tracey: Re-Fragmented makes available at www.traceyfragments.com all the footage from the shoot of the film for users to download and re-edit their own related projects including music videos, new trailers or to re-edit the entire movie themselves. The Creative Commons licensed initiative also makes available the score of the movie by Indie Collective Broken Social Scene.
Director Bruce McDonald explains the inspiration behind the project: “The Tracey Fragments is a film that fully embraces experimentation and teamwork. I wanted to find out if that experience exists on the Internet and give others the chance to experiment and play with some beautifully shot footage of a world class actress in a free form environment. I hope people make their own feature films, short films, rock videos, trailers, experimental films and personal manifestos out of The Tracey Fragments.”
McDonald’s decision to embrace CC-licensing for The Tracey Fragments is remarkable in both practice and scope. Fans can choose to do what they will with the massive amount of assets provided ( under the terms of the BY-NC-SA licence), interpreting and re-envisioning the the film and its subject material in what is bound to be a variety of ways. By putting the film’s assets in the hands of would-be-editors and film-makers under CC-licences, Tracey: Re-Fragmented recognizes and embraces the concept of a hybrid economy, allowing people to experiment freely with the content around them while retaining the film’s commercial interests.
The Tracey Fragments already represents a fascinating foray into unique narrative and filmic techniques (specifically multi-frame editing) and Tracey: Re-Fragmented continues that experimental nature into the realm of content licensing. It should be noted that Re-Fragmented also functions as a contest in which the winner will receive a Tracey/Final Cut prize package, the details of which can be found at the “Re-Fragmented” section at the “Tracey website. The Tracey Fragments has its US premier at the AFI Film Festival in Los Angeles on Nov. 6th at 6:45. You can find other select screening times at the Tracey Fragments blog.
3 Comments »Commoner Letter #2 – Cory Doctorow
To the Commoners community, from Cory Doctorow:
My writing career and Creative Commons are inextricably bound together. My first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published by Tor, the largest science fiction publisher in the world, on January 9, 2003, just a few days after CC launched its first licenses. I was the first author to use the licenses, applying them to my book and releasing it for free online on the same day it appeared in stores. Today, the book has been through more printings than I can keep track of, been translated into more languages than I know, and has been downloaded more than 750,000 times from my site alone (I don’t know the total number of downloads, because, of course, anyone is free to redistribute it).
I’ve applied Creative Commons licenses to all my books since, including the comics that IDW just adapted from six of my short stories. I use CC for my speeches, for my articles and op-eds, and for articles and stories that I write for “straight” magazines from Forbes to Radar. My co-editors and I use CC licenses for our popular blog, Boing Boing, one of the most widely read blogs in the world. These licenses have allowed my work to spread far and wide, into corners of the world I never could have reached. I hear from sailors on battleships, volunteers working in the developing world, kids in underfunded school-districts, and people who “don’t usually read this sort of thing” but found my work because a friend was able to introduce them to it. My readers have made innumerable technical remixes, fan-fic installments, fan-art drawings, songs, translations and other fun and inspiring creative works from mine, each time humbling and inspiring me (and enriching me!).
CC turns my books from nouns into verbs. My books *do stuff*, get passed around and recut and remade to suit the needs of each reader, turned to their hand the way that humans always have adapted their tools and stories to fit their circumstances. As Tim O’Reilly says, my problem is not piracy, it’s obscurity, and CC licenses turn my books into dandelion seeds, able to blow in the wind and find every crack in every sidewalk, sprouting up in unexpected places. Each seed is a possibility, an opportunity for someone out there to buy a physical copy of the book, to commission work from me, to bring me in for a speech. I once sold a reprint of an article of mine to an editor who saw it in a spam message — the spammer had pasted it into the “word salad” at the bottom of his boner-pill pitch to get past the filters. The editor read the piece, liked it, googled me, and sent me a check.
CC lets me be financially successful, but it also lets me attain artistic and ethical success. Ethical in the sense that CC licenses give my readers a legal framework to do what readers have always done in meatspace: pass the works they love back and forth, telling each other stories the way humans do. Artistic because we live in the era of copying, the era when restricting copying is a fool’s errand, and by CC gives me an artistic framework to embrace copying rather than damning it.
Writers all over the world are adopting CC licenses, creating an artistic movement that treats copying as a feature, not a bug. As a science fiction writer, this is enormously satisfying: here we have artists who are acting as though they live in the future, not the past. CC is changing the world, making it safe for copying, and just in time, too.
No Comments »Source for Creative Commons Licensed (Live)Content
Russell from Worldlabel.com, a proud sponsor of the LiveContent project which you can help fill up with CC licensed content, sent over a link from mashable.com which lists 25+ sources of Creative Commons licensed content.
While Creative Commons only provides free open content licenses and doesn’t have a database or store content, we have a list on our wiki (which you can add your project to!) of content providers, which we call Content Directories.
If your favorite CC-license-powered project isn’t listed, then add it with this form. The LiveContent project will be automagically (isn’t that last years word?) pull down content from the Content Directories to give a snapshot of the CC-licensed content universe. So, please step up to the plate, add your favorite project to the Content Directories page and participate in LiveContent.
LiveContent 2.0 will go to the printers in mid-to-late November, so now’s the time to participate :)
No Comments »Music business futures: classical and services
Matt Haughey (CC’s Creative Director 2002-2005) on how to see the future of the music business in today’s classical music business.
Lucas Gonze (worked on an early version of ccMixter in 2004) on the business of artist services, see comments on followup posts (roundup) for insightful discussion of the role of artists, artist services, labels, and tastemakers, featuring among others Victor Stone (ccMixter leader and remixer), Gurdonark (ambient musician and ccMixter participant), and Derek Sivers (CDBaby).
That was better than over 90% of music conference panels, and nobody had to fly anywhere.
Previous on tastemakers.
No Comments »New Zealand Successfully Ports Creative Commons Licenses
October has been one busy month — The CC Team in Greece held a phenomenal launch at the University of Athens (video, photos), Luxembourg became the 40th jurisdiction to port the CC licenses, CC HQ kicked off our 3rd annual fundraising campaign, and now:
New Zealand will now offer Creative Commons licenses adapted to its national law.
The Project Lead in NZ, Dr. Brian Opie, worked with his legal team under the auspices of Te Whāinga Aronui The Council for the Humanities in collaboration with Creative Commons to bring the licensing suite to New Zealand.
The launch will be celebrated October 27 in Wellington at the National Library, followed by a free seminar hosted by Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand on the new licensing environment in the digital world.
Congratulations, New Zealand!
Carved Maori Pole, photo by dartio licensed under CC BY-NC-SA.
Help develop a course on Creative Business in the Digital Era
The Open Rights Group, in collaboration with 01zero-one and funded by the London Development Agency, is beginning an exciting new research project, examining how the internet enables creative entrepreneurs to develop innovative business practices by being more open with their intellectual property. Creative Business in the Digital Era will examine new business models and the wider context in which they sit, culminating in one day-long and two evening courses at which we will share our findings.
In the fine tradition of eating our own dogfood, we are developing the course out in the open, and under a Creative Commons licence, using a wiki. But we need your help. We have only a couple of months to do our research, so we need you to help us shape of the course, figure out the format of the case studies, and carry out research. Time is genuinely tight – we must complete all the course materials by the beginning of February, ready for delivery in March.
Right now, this week, we need your ideas. What open-IP business models have you come across? And who is experimenting with opening up their IP?
This is a fantastic project with a mandate to deliver results quickly. You can participate in the research phase immediately just by tagging relevant resources on del.icio.us with org-cbde, or dive into the course development wiki. Follow the project’s blog and twitter.
Here are some recent and possibly relevant links from this blog, culled from the bi-monthly CC Newsletter‘s “CC in Business” links:
- CC, UGC platform integration and customer acquisition
- Sony uses CC in Blu-ray marketing campaign
- Wiki to books: Wikitravel Press launches
- Amarok developer hired by Magnatune
- PodTech Pays Lan Bui for CC Licensed Photograph
- Community content and money
- Jamendo attracts VC funding
- Blast Magazine Chooses CC
- Sun CEO: free media = free software, innovation != litigation
- Sony launches CC-enabled video site
- Creative Commons in Newspapers, Scientists, Film Students, and Wikipedia SEOers (!?)
- O’Reilly on free downloads vs sales
- CopyCamp conversations
RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA
RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA, an art exhibit that celebrates “the cultural and artistic practice of remix”, opens this Friday at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA). From BAM/PFA:
RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA [...] invit[es] guest artists to “rip, mix, and burn” elements from two digital-media works in the museum’s collection—Ken Goldberg’s Ouija 2000 and Valéry Grancher’s 24h00 (both 1999)—resulting in new artistic creations. Drawing from the open-source software tradition, with the permission of artists Goldberg and Grancher, the remix artists may alter or revise original code or media files from the source works, or they may choose to take a more conceptual route, remixing some of the methods or behaviors of the originals into their own new works.
We are co-hosting the opening of RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA, and as such there will be plenty of CC schwag and “free beer” come this Friday. The exhibit looks to be quite the happening, so make sure to check it out if you are interested!
Head to the upcoming page for more info.
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