Weblog
2008 October
We met the Safe Creative challenge!
I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve met Safe Creative’s matching challenge 4 days before the deadline! Thanks to everyone who took advantage of Safe Creative’s generous offer to match all donations up to $4000. Instead of raising $4000 we raised $8000 — which will help us continue providing the world with the tools you so readily rely upon.
If you have yet to donate to CC by joining the CC Network, please consider doing so now. There are only two months left in the campaign and we still need to raise $438,958. Here’s a brief list of ways you can help; for more options check out our Other Ways to Give page:
- Join the CC Network
- Increase the value of your donation by participating in your company’s matching gifts program
- Buy swag from the CC store
- Send us a gift of stock
- Encourage the company you work for to consider becoming a corporate sponsor
- Promote the campaign on your blog and encourage your readers to give via the CC widget
CC exists for you — help keep us running so you can continue to use our tools to help build and sustain a shared culture. Special thanks to Safe Creative and to the hundreds of CC community members who are participating in the campaign — your support is greatly appreciated.
No Comments »CC Salons: Denver/Boulder and Starting Your Own
We recently caught wind of some inspiring news – unbeknown to us, a very active CC Salon has been happening in the Boulder/Denver CO area through Slice of Lime, a design and development firm. They are on their 8th installment, an impressive feat we haven’t even matched ourselves in certain locations. If you live in the area, be sure to check them out next month on 11/19 for discussions of CC over “beer, chips, and cupcakes.”
It seems a good time then to feature our recently revamped Salon wiki page. Borrowing heavily from our good friends at dorkbot, we are hoping to make the process for starting CC Salons in your area (if one doesn’t already exist) simple and straight forward. Simiarly, we hope that we can explain realistically what making a successful Salon entails.
More than anything, a successful Salon boils down to the interests of your specific geographical community – each city and area has its own identity and it is important to approach the Salon format from that perspective. What issues are important to you and the people in your area, and how does CC relate?The Salons are meant to address the belief that, while CC exists primarily as a digital tool, it is nothing without the actual people who use it.
The Salons are a great way to meet people who are using CC and open tools, and remains one of our best methods to help people understand exactly what CC does and how they can use it in their own lives. Check out Salon page for details on cities that have featured Salons, both currently and in the past – we currently curate Salons in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City but there are a slew of other cities that have shown active interest in the past.
No Comments »Gwen Stefani and baby Zuma pic online under a CC license
Photo: Dennis Stefani, (c) Mrs. Me, Inc., 2008, made available under a CC BY-NC-ND license
Pop star Gwen Stefani and her husband, rocker Gavin Rossdale recently welcomed a baby, Zuma Nesta Rock Rossdale, into the world. Many celebrities contract with a magazine to arrange an exclusive photo session that debuts mother with newborn. But Stefani and Rossdale took a different approach and hired their own photographer and put the photo online for the public under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license, along with some additional terms that allow all print magazines, newspapers, and blogs to use the photo – even commercially, with some restrictions. You can download a high-res version of the photo (and check out the additional terms the photo is available under) at Stefani’s site.
2 Comments »Regional Workshop in Caucasus Leading CC Projects to First License Drafts
On October 23, CC Legal and Public Project Leads from Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia met in Tbilisi, Georgia for a workshop to discuss the CCi license porting process in their jurisdictions. The workshop was facilitated by representatives of the Eurasia Partnership Foundation (EPF) and Nena Antic, Legal Project Lead from CC Serbia.
At the workshop, the Project Leads from the South Caucasus presented base-line assessments of their jurisdiction’s copyright legislation, a follow-up to the detailed reports they conducted in summer 2008. The results were evaluated to determine the steps required to port the core CC licenses to the legal framework in each respective jurisdiction.
Nena Antic shared her experience with the CCi license porting process in Serbia by highlighting the main obstacles, lessons learned, and CC Serbia’s tangible results so far. Nena provided in-depth explanations for the changes she introduced to adapt the CC licensing suite to Serbian law and led the workshop’s discussion on legal terminology, the NC & ND license elements, and Collective Rights Management.
Vazgen Karapetyan, EPF’s Senior Cross-Border Programs Officer and co-organizer of the workshop, remarked, “As a whole, the workshop proved highly instrumental in familiarizing the participating Affiliate Institutions with the successful experience of their Serbian counterpart. Learning about the necessary changes to port the CC licenses will definitely help the Legal Project Leads in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia develop their own first draft licenses.”
The first drafts from the three South Caucasus nations are expected to enter the public discussion on December 1, 2008.
The CC license porting commenced in the South Caucasus in May 2008 when the EPF announced a regional grant competition titled Support to the Adoption of Creative Commons Licensing Framework in the Countries of the South Caucasus. The Center for Information Law and Policy (Armenia) and the Young Lawyers Union (Azerbaijan) were identified as competition winners. On July 14, 2008, the two organizations were awarded individual grants to implement their 12-month projects in collaboration with Creative Commons International. In Georgia, a team of local legal experts representing Business Intelligence and Valuation GROUP – “BVG”, Ltd. was contracted by EPF/Georgia to oversee the CC Georgia project in partnership with the above Armenian and Azerbaijani organizations and CCi.
Image: “Tbilisi Old District” in the public domain.
No Comments »IE Business School Opens Up Multimedia
IE Business School, an international leader in business, offers masters and doctorate degrees via an innovative blend of in-class and online course methods. Though its central campus is in Madrid, the school caters to students from more than 65 countries around the world, and recently it has opened up its multimedia documentation to everyone else.
“IE develops multimedia documentation for both online and face to face courses. More than one hundred modules across all management areas have been developed in house. These modules include multimedia case studies, simulations, online games, interactive graphs and exercises.”
The multimedia is offered in both Spanish and English and is released online under CC BY-NC-ND.
No Comments »CC Salon LA (11/11/08): Dublab and Lucas Gonze
In a little under two weeks, CC Salon LA returns (11/11/08) with a fantastic combination of presenters – joining us will be web radio collective Dublab and Lucas Gonze, net-label theorist and XSPF developer.
Both presentations will discuss how CC, and ‘openness’ in general, is affecting web radio and net labels, both from an economic and artistic vantage, with a Q&A to follow each. Additionally, Dublab will be bringing a physical ‘Into Infinity’ loop station, allowing Salon goers to create their own 8-second loops in the vein of Into Infinity, the CC/Dublab co-sponsored art exhibit ask salon attendees to create noise – both as a group and as individuals – which will be recorded and turned into audio loops that will be used for the Into Infinity project, a new art exhibition produced in collaboration with Creative Commons.
The Salon will be taking place at the always wonderful FOUND Gallery (Google map) between 7:30PM – 9:30PM. Follow the event on Upcoming, mark attending on Facebook, and make sure to come down and hear from two exemplary members of the CC community on their experiences with open licensing. As always, there will be free (as in beer) drinks for the entire night.
No Comments »Finals Club
Finals Club is a new website that aims to provide an online space for college students to blog about class lectures as well as converse in forums on a range of academic topics. Students can form groups, invite their friends to join, and assign tasks all with the goal of a more comprehensive learning experience and, as the Harvard Crimson points out, increased “transparency among study groups.”
All of the user-generated content at Finals Club is released under a CC BY-NC license, keeping the content created therein open and free to use for future students. While currently only available at a select group of universities, Finals Club shows great promise as a platform for students to collaborate academically in an open manner.
No Comments »CC Talks With: SomeRightsReserved
SomeRightsReserved is the digital publishing platform for creative cooperative KithKin, a group of designers and creatives who are attempting to take a “genuine passion for inspiring people and celebrating creativity” and turn it into something tangible. Discussed earlier here, SRR are not only producing some fantastic products but are similarly experimenting with licensing in ways that challenge traditional design practices. We recently caught up with Ian Atkins, founder of KithKin/SRR, to get a better sense of how SomeRightsReserved functions as an organization, how they use CC licensing, and their plans for the future.
Can you give our readers some background on what SomeRightsReserved does? What makes you different from other design firms?
SomeRightsReserved is our digital publishing platform. It features a wide variety of ‘products’ ranging from laser cut ready design, to books and music. The group of designers behind the shop, KithKin, are primarily from a design background, but the shop is not limited by genre or discipline.
The initial thoughts that led to the development of SomeRightsReserved arouse from a desire from several of the designers to make and sell their designs and creations. In design this traditionally means a protracted period of time of development, testing, protecting your idea, and then getting made, then trying to sell it. Oh and finding the money to do so.
Now we can conceive an idea, refine it in a day and publish it the next. We publish almost anything in a digital format, whether it be rapid prototype files, which can be used to produce physical objects, to subversive pieces of viral software.
We let designers and creatives publish their products on their terms, exhibiting and touring their work offline and online.
Read More…
APEC’s HRDWG Openly Licenses Wiki
APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation)’s Human Resources Development Working Group (HRDWG) has released all their wiki content under CC BY-NC-SA, including their Education Network (EDNET). EDNET is the hub of APEC’s education activities in the pacific rim. Its goal is “to foster strong and vibrant learning systems across APEC member economies, promote education for all, and strengthen the role of education in promoting social, individual, economic and sustainable development.” The priority areas of EDNET are
- Mathematics
- Career and Technical Education
- Learning Each Other’s Languages
- ICT and Systemic Reform
CC Talks With: MusicBrainz
We recently had the pleasure of catching up with Robert Kaye, “lead geek” at MusicBrainz, a community music database that “attempts to create a comprehensive music information site.” Kaye fills us in on what is happening at MusicBrainz, including extensive background on the project, how they use CC licenses, and their goal to add broader support for classical music.
Where does MusicBrainz fit in the open content ecology?
MusicBrainz plays an important role in blazing the path for open databases. We know how to play with open source and music, and we have few examples of how to work
with open structured data. We work hard to make our data useful and available to people, as we believe that Metcalfe’s law also applies to data. Thus, getting lots of people to use our data makes MusicBrainz vastly more useful and valuable. With that in mind, we want to be the de-facto standard for music metadata in the open content ecology.
Read More…
