Weblog
2007 May
((c)urve)music Remix Contest
(©urve)music™* is a very cool UK label which specializes in chilly Latin jazz and collects brilliant vocalists like nobody’s business. They have agreed to throw several a cappellas and instrumental tracks into the Commons looking to gather enough material for a pair of all CC music remix albums later this year.
ccMixter is only happy to oblige by hosting the source material as of this morning under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license. We’ll be running the call for remixes as the (©urve)music™ Remix Contest. Check out the contest home page for the details.
*Don’t get nervous, the ‘tm’ is for Talent Management.
No Comments »FreeCulture.org Post-Conference Plug
Photo by mecredis (FRED!) licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
For all that did and did not attend the fabulous FreeCulture.org National Conference this year, there is a great blog post that gives a birds eye view of the event last weekend. John Wilbanks from Science Commons presented as well as many others from various projects in the commons.
FreeCulture.org is a movement to get more people into Free Culture starting by getting more student chapters charged globally. The Wikipedia entry defines the Free Culture Movement as:
…a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative works, using the Internet as well as other media, and objects to overly restrictive copyright laws, which many members of the movement also argue hinder creativity. Closely associated with the free culture movement are organizations in the free software movement, such as the Free Software Foundation.
Another organization commonly associated with free culture is Creative Commons (CC), founded by Lawrence Lessig. Lessig is a law professor at Stanford University and a prominent figure in the free software movement. He wrote a book called Free Culture, which provides many arguments in favor of the free culture movement.
This is a great thing, and we at CC try to support the Free Culture movement however we can. If you don’t have a chapter at your school, then please start one and let us know! Free Culture.
No Comments »CC Salon London and Post-CC Salon Seoul
After a brilliant CC Salon in Seoul at the beginning of May, Judge Jongsoo (Jay) Yoon, sent me a URL with the most media I’ve seen captured from one salon. I wish I could have been there to eat some good bibimbap or other dish and talk CC Korea (1 of the 36 CC Project Jurisdictions) :)
And, like I’ve said many times, anyone can start a CC Salon where they’d like: Help CC Spread!
This is what Tim Cowlishaw is doing in London. He is organizing the first CC Salon London:
Creative Commons, the Open Rights Group and Free Culture UK are pleased to
announce the first London CC-Salon event, to be held in Shoreditch on
Thursday 28th June 2007.The CC Salon is a monthly event focused on building a community of artists
and developers around Creative Commons licenses, standards, and technology,
and have been running with great success in cities around the world,
including San Francisco, Berlin and Johannesberg. All are welcome,
especially anyone interested in Creative Commons, copyright, Free Culture,
Open Source, art, media, and music.CC-Salon will held on the last Thursday of every month, at Juno, 135
Shoreditch High Street, London E1 6JE, from 6.30pm until midnight. The June
event will feature contributions from:Tom Reynolds (Random Acts of Reality – http://randomreality.blogware.com)
Elizabeth Stark (Free Culture USA – http://www.freeculture.org)
Jonathan Roberts (FreeMeDVD – http://questionsplease.org/freeme)
and after-dinner.net DJs
In addition, we’ve got 100 free Magnatune.com <http://magnatune.com/> gift
vouchers to give away, courtesy of John Buckman. Each voucher is worth $8,
or one album from Magnatune’s large and eclectic catalogue of DRM-free,
CC-licenced music.There’s plenty more planned for future events, and we’d love to hear from
anyone interested in participating, whether by performing, exhibiting work,
or giving a talk or presentation. Please email tim at ccsalon-london.org.uk if
this sounds like you!
Let us know if you start a salon in your locale! We like to send out schwag to help get things going!
No Comments »Tin foil hats and electric giraffes
From our excellent post at the Robotics Pavilion, the Creative Commons team could watch visitors participate in the huge array of activities, crafts, and inventions featured at last weekend’s Maker Faire in San Mateo. Faire goers wandered the grounds between countless interactive stations to enjoy flame throwers, educational presentations, sewing, silk screening, and the popular robot battles. We were very pleased to be involved in the exhibit this year, and would like to thank the event coordinators and sponsors who made it possible!
CC BY-NC-SA by r.i.c.h. (Rich Dahlgren)
CC BY-NC-ND by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid
Copying machine or creative tool?
Ed Felten distills the impact of computers on cultural production and the ensuing debate to its essence:
[W]hether IT is primarily a copying machine, or a creative tool
The answer to most reading this Creative Commons blog will be obvious, but Felten lays it out in great detail in a talk called Rip, Mix, Burn, Sue: Technology, Politics, and the Fight to Control Digital Media, which he apparently reprised last weekend. Audio, video and transcript from an earlier version are available under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.
No Comments »IBM on “Building a New IP Marketplace”
IBM assembled a worldwide community of 50 experts in the fields of law, academia, economics, government, technology and others. These experts collaborated with IBMers to discuss the issues, determine the key characteristics of a properly functioning IP marketplace, and establish a blueprint for meaningful change.
Throughout May and June 2006, the group collaborated in the online IP Marketplace wiki, a new media tool that enables documents to be collaboratively written and rewritten through a common Web site.
So how does IBM signal good faith and get buy in from IP experts to collaborate on Bulding a New IP Marketplace (which almost exclusively concerns patents, as it happens)? At least in part, publish under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
To appropriate and update an old phrase: “Nobody gets fired for imitating IBM.”
Via CC Mexico’s León Felipe Sánchez Ambía on cc-community.
No Comments »Livephotoblogging the CC Board
Creative Commons Board Chair Joi Ito took some great pictures at a recent CC board meeting. Here’s the Flickr set, all under CC Attribution.
Eric Saltzman, Jamie Boyle, Eric Eldred
Laurie Racine, Lawrence Lessig
Michael Carroll (check out his blog)
Joi Ito on Leicaism.
No Comments »Science Commons, SPARC Announce New Tools for Scholarly Publishing
From the Science Commons blog …
No Comments »“Together with SPARC and MIT, we are proud to announce the release of a set of online tools designed to help authors retain rights over their scholarly works, including the right to self-archive their material.
The Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine is one of these tools, making it easier for authors to select and attach an addendum to the standard copyright transfer form, allowing them to amend the traditional terms of agreement with publishers. The Addendum Engine makes this as simple as point-and-click.
The tool can be found on the Science Commons, SPARC and MIT Web sites, and can also be readily implemented on university sites, such as our first adopter – Carnegie Mellon University. By providing the means to easily plug in the addendum generator on sites such as Carnegie Mellons, the tool takes on a new role, serving as a university toolkit.
Through the Addendum Engine, authors can choose from an array of provided addenda, some of which have been consolidated in order to address the problem of addenda proliferation. This is true of the Science Commons and SPARC addenda, named “Access-Reuse”, a combination of the SPARC Author Addendum and the Science Commons Publish-Creative Commons Addendum.
For details on specifying a default agreement and to integrate the addendum generator onto your Web site like Carnegie Mellon, click here.
We invite you to take a look at the other addenda and materials part of this release. For more information about the launch, please read the official press release. You can also learn more about this project on our Web site, or by visiting SPARC and MIT. “
CC Australia and the CC Video Slam!
Someone has to pick up the slack on reporting on all of CC Australia’s great work. I guess that will be me. Check out what Jessica Coates said on the cc-community mailing list.
Just wanted to drop you a quick line to point out a great collaborative film project CCau took part in over the weekend – the Open Channel Video Slam (http://www.openchannel.org.au/artslaw/index.html). Apologies for cross posts.
Basically the idea was to produce one 10 minute film, made entirely out of CC and original content, by locking 22 filmmakers in a bar for 33 hours a whole lot of equipment, wireless internet access, and coffee, alcohol and pizza. The event was organised by Andrew Garton of the Open Channel Screen Resource Centre (http://www.openchannel.org.au) a government funded film production and training centre, and was hosted by Horse Bazaar (http://www.horsebazaar.com.au/) a great digital-arts bar in the heart of Melbourne that hosts the Digital Fringe Festival each year. Elliott Bledsoe and I from CCau were both there to help with training and addressing tricky issues (eg licence compatibility, searching etc).
What we ended up with was a 10 minute film that incorporates 110 CC-licensed works – photos, video, sound, music. This final product was screened in Horse Bazaar and on the big screen in Melbourne’s cultural hub, Federation Square, at 7pm Monday 14 May. It’s also available for download under a BY-NC-SA licence at http://openchannel.org.au/blogs/videoslam/.
It was a truly amazing experience, and a great learning curve for both us and the participants. Elliott and Andrew both documented the experience on their blogs (http://openchannel.org.au/blogs/videoslam/ and http://elliottsawitfirst.blogspot.com/). We’re also hoping to write up some of the lessons learned in an article, and maybe even an academic paper.
Jessica Coates
CCau
The question I have, is can this model spread? Who might be interested in doing this type of event? Hop onto our discussion list (cc-community) and/or blog about how you might do this type of event and link here for permalink trackback fun.
No Comments »Sun CEO: free media = free software, innovation != litigation
Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has a fine blog post in which he describes the Sun’s decision to pursue an “open” strategy rather than prosecute the “open” world and its results:
In essence, we decided to innovate, not litigate.
Further down:
All of which is to say – no amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software (they are the same, after all). The community is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company. And you will never turn back the clock on elementary school students and developing economies and aid agencies and fledgling universities – or the Fortune 500 – that have found value in the wisdom of the open source community. Open standards and open source software are literally changing the face of the planet – creating opportunity wherever the network can reach.
Nice to see this nod to open media. What company will be the Sun equivalent in the media space? Creative Commons will be a key part of that company’s strategy, as open standards and more recently open source have been key for Sun. The rest of the industry will follow.
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