Lessig Blog Archives

Flickr: fumi:

So as you know, this weekend CC celebrated its fifth birthday. In parties in Beijing, Berlin, Manila, Seoul, Belgrade, Brisbane, New York, Bangalore, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, thousands of CC supporters got together to remember the last five years, and get a peek of the next five. (Flickr stream).

I was in San Francisco at an extraordinary event at which Gilberto Gil and his son, Bem, and DJ Spooky performed. During my talk, I made a bunch of announcements. The key points were these:

1. Current TV will start integrating CC licenses into their citizen created content system.
2. CC0: On January 15, we will release a beta protocol to support a new tool, “CC0.” CC0 will enable two things: (1) a simple, machine readable way to mark work with either a waiver of rights, or an assertion that no rights attach to a particular work, and (2) a simple way to sign that waiver/assertion. The protocol is intended to support use cases where the desire is that no rights attach to some work. E.g., databases in Europe (where the database rights muck up research), or material in the open education movement. Simultaneously with the announcement, Science Commons released its “Open Access Data Protocol,” which implements CC0 to support freeing data.
3. Legal Commons (beta): Taking inspiration from the liberator and manumitter of government documents and legal cases, Carl Malamud, Creative Commons will enter into a joint venture with public.resource.org to collect and make available machine readable copies of government documents and law. Carl and I have committed to freeing all federal case law by the end of 2008. Importantly, this effort will not set up competing systems to the emerging ecology of great free law services (Cornell’s LII, or Columbia’s Altlaw.org). We instead will help gather and make available the resources those services use to provide their amazing service. So look for a tarball of all federal cases by the end of 2008, in parsable and usable plain text.
4. CC+: This protocol enables a simple click through ability to get rights or permissions beyond those provided by a CC license. So, e.g., a Flickr photo licensed under a BY-NC license could have a simple click through to some agent to provide commercial rights for that photo. We announced with a bunch of partners already. But really key was:
5. Yahoo announced it was baking CC+ “into the system” of Yahoo, making it possible for any Yahoo service to offer content using the CC+ infrastructure.
6. The Annual Campaign, this year with a $500,000 target, has exceeded its target by almost $40,000. This includes $50,000 contributions from Sun and Microsoft, and a $20,000 contribution from Tim O’Reilly.
7. [5×5] Challenge: After Hewlett issued a challenge to find 5 funders to promise 5 years of support at $500,000 a year, we announced pledges to match the commitment: The Hewlett Foundation, Omidyar Network, an (so far) anonymous European trust, Google/Mozilla/Red Hat (3-1-1), and amazingly, our board which promised to personally commit to either raise or contribute $500k/year. This means we’ve got core funding for 5 more years, and the first time I could breathe easily in more than 5 years.

   Stay tuned for more on each. But suffice: it was an amazing night.

We’re in the final four days of CC’s push to complete the CC fundraising campaign by Saturday. Last week we learned that Sun had doubled its contribution from last year. On Friday, our local hero, Tim O’Reilly, doubled his contribution from last year. And today we learned that Microsoft has also doubled its contribution from last year.

Doublemint yours today. Or singlemint if you’ve not given before. And if we can push a few more into the bucket, then we call can go back to work!

Tama’s is the latest winning Flickr photo in the CC Flickr contest. It nicely captures my obsessive focus these next 9 days.

We turn 5 on the 15th. We’ve got a long way to got to meet our target for the year. Ordinarily we’d have till the end of the year. But this year, I want to meet the target by December 15. We’ve all been working insanely hard to pull this (and a list of amazing announcements) together. I want to be able to let the staff go back to life on December 16. And I want to have sometime to explain to my 4 year old just how reindeer fly.

So please, if you haven’t, support us now. If you have, support us again. If you’ve got any really good dirt on someone, blackmail them now. And, as a special (if corrupt) bonus: If you donate $100 or more, I’ll send a free DVD of my first corruption lecture. Just send an email to [email protected] after you make your donation with an address, and off it will go.

iCommons is the group CC incubated and then have begun to spin out this year. Its aim is to build a common (but not CC owned) platform for digital freedom related issues (A2K, free software, open source software, free culture, free knowledge, activism, etc.). Its main annual event is a conference. The first year was Boston. The second, Brazil. Last year, Croatia. Next year Japan.

iCommons is having an auction to build support (and $$!, or actually €) for iCommons. Among the items auctioned is the (embarrassingly worn) black jacket I have worn while traveling about 500,000 miles over the last few years. Weird (but clean). Bid away!

As you’ll see in this video, there has been important progress in making Wikipedia compatible with the world of Creative Commons licensed work. But we should be very precise about this extremely good news: As Jimmy announces, the Wikimedia Foundation Board has agreed with a proposal made by the Free Software Foundation that will permit Wikipedia (and other such wikis) to relicense under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

That is very different from saying that Wikipedia has relicensed under a CC license. The decision whether to take advantage of this freedom granted by the FSF when the FSF grants it will be a decision the Wikipedia community will have to make. We are very hopeful that the community will ratify this move to compatible freedoms. And if they do, we are looking forward to an extraordinary celebration.

Read the Wikimedia Foundation resolution here.

My endless thanks to everyone who has helped make this possible, from Richard Stallman and the FSF board, to the important leaders within the Wikipedia community who say yet another legal obstacle to freedom that they could remove.

We received this happy missive in the mail yesterday: The plaintiffs in the lawsuit about Virgin using a CC-licensed photo have dismissed CC from the case. This is not a settlement. It is not the product of negotiation. It is the recognition by plaintiffs counsel that the laws of Texas and the United States give the plaintiffs no cause to sue Creative Commons.

As I said when I announced the lawsuit here, the fact that the laws of the United States don’t make us liable for the misuse in this context doesn’t mean that we’re not working extremely hard to make sure misuse doesn’t happen. It is always a problem (even if not a legal problem) when someone doesn’t understand what our licenses do, or how they work. We need to work harder to make that clear. But the news today lets us go back to the work of Creative Commons, without the burden of this lawsuit hanging above us.

So how can you celebrate with us? Well, help us recover some of the costs (probably $15k) that we have to eat because of this suit (deductibles with our insurance company, etc) by supporting CC. Or help us by joining as just a friend of CC. Or help us by spreading the news that the lawsuit is over.

And as one final word to the plaintiffs here — a word I can utter because neither required nor asked: As CEO of Creative Commons, I apologize for any trouble that confusion about our licenses might have created. We thought the meaning was clear. We work hard to make this as clear as we can. We will work harder.