Category Archives: creative commons

Educause has published a nice short piece about Creative Commons licenses. Of particular interest to me is question 5 — “What are the downsides?” While I agree there are boundaries to clarify about noncommercial licensing (and more about that soon), I’m not as convinced that there is any ambiguity about the scope of the “share alike” provision. The example considered is of a BY-SA photo included in a report. Does the whole report have to be BY-SA? My view is no — including a picture is not a derivative work of the picture. Some have suggested we expand BY-SA to reach beyond derivative works. We’ll be talking about that more soon on the CC list. Meanwhile, I’m grateful to see such good work devoted to explaining our work. Continue reading →

To anyone at SXSW, a message from CC:

CHALLENGE
We challenge you, our community, to raise $6000 for Creative Commons by subscribing to GOOD Magazine and having a drink with us at the famed South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, TX. All it takes is for 200 people over the next 2 weeks to subscribe to GOOD. No, my math skills are not wrong. If you subscribe in the next 2 weeks your $20 bucks will be generously matched by Six Apart for up to $2000. So you won’t just raise $4000 for CC but $6000.

DETAILS
Since July 2006, Creative Commons has been one of the 12 non-profits benefitting from the Choose GOOD campaign. GOOD magazine was started by some innovative people who have taken a non-traditional approach to promoting their magazine – and have experienced unbelievable success. The folks at GOOD have been traveling around the nation hosting parties and more importantly raising money and awareness for the non-profits that they support.

Over the past 7 months they have sold 11,899 subscriptions generating over $200,000 which in turn is gifted to 12 non-profits that are doing new, innovative, and great things. CC is one of them and since July GOOD has raised over $11,000 for us!

We need your help to make GOOD Magazine’s SXSW party honoring Creative Commons the most successful party they’ve hosted to date. Cover charge is the $20 subscription fee and we strongly suggest emailing your rsvp to [email protected]

If you want to help support CC and attend one of GOOD’s infamous parties but do not reside in the Austin, TX area don’t worry – your subscription fee gets you into any of the upcoming GOOD parties. And yes all parties are open bar.

By subscribing to this awesome new magazine you gain entrance to the biggest GOOD/SXSW party to date and you’re helping us raise $6000 for CC. That money will support what we continue to do best – enable a participatory culture.

SXSW GOOD Party details:
with Special Guest Joi Ito, CC Chairman
VJ Phi Phenomenon
DJ Filip Turbotito
Ima Robot
ex Junio Senior

Monday March 12th
Uncle Flirty’s
325 E. Sixth St. (on corner of Trinity and Sixth)
Austin, TX

This Event is for GOOD subscribers only

Continue reading →

Jono Bacon intends to record an album in 24 hours on March 30 and 31st, license it under CC, and give the pledged proceeds to charity. He’s passed the £1000 mark, aiming for double that. Continue reading →

Creative Commons is still accepting applications for summer interns. If you’re interested, check it out here. Continue reading →

Version 2 of the “freedoms license generator” is now up. Play, and let us know what you think. The aim of the tool is to help develop an intuitive sense of the relationship between the freedoms/constraints of the Creative Commons licenses. It’s got a fancy new interface, and is now really fast. Continue reading →

It is with sadness that I post that we’re looking for a new General Counsel at Creative Commons. After two fantastic years at the legal helm, our current GC, Mia Garlick, like the GC before her, Glenn Brown, has been snatched up by the Google Monster. (It’s a nice monster, but very lawyer-hungry).

This is a insanely cool job, though of course, for only non-profit pay. But for anyone eager to move into a more interesting, remake-the-world kind of practice, check out the description on the CC site. Continue reading →

Two friends of Creative Commons have been nominated for an Oscar: Board member Davis Guggenheim‘s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (husband of Christiane Henckel von Donnersmarck, original director of Creative Commons International)’s film, The Lives of Others.

(No, we get no tickets.) Continue reading →

Details to follow later today, but when you add our offline campaign to the online campaign (and assuming we solidify some pledges made in the final week), we will have bested our goal of $300,000 by some $200,000 — raising over $500,000 in total. Stay tuned for some interesting surprises (and feel free to give some more in the meantime.) Continue reading →

Last year it was Microsoft that put us over in our online campaign to raise support for CC. This year, at 5 AM Berlin time (and hence, 8 PM San Francisco time), it was Aaron Swartz who broke the thermometer. Stay tuned for some very cool news about the offline campaign. We should have totals early this week. And thanks to everyone who made this a success. Continue reading →

This is a fun project I’ve been pushing inside CC which, thanks to endless work by our GC Mia Garlick and a Stanford student, Dana Powers, has now launched as a beta.

The background is this: US copyright law gives creators an inalienable right to terminate any “transfer” or assignment of copyright after 35 years. The idea was to give the creator a second bite at the apple, an idea that goes back to the first US copyright law.

The problem with the procedure is — surprise, surprise! — it is INSANELY complicated. It is almost as if — AS IF — it was designed not to be used.

So Creative Commons decided it would take a crack at making the system easier. We’ve developed a tool that will help an author determine whether or when an assignment is terminable. And our idea is to work with legal aid clinics around the country to refer likely terminators for final termination (it is an irresistible word for us Californians).

At this stage, the tool doesn’t refer you. And you should not use or rely on anything that comes from this BETA. But we’d be very eager for people to play around with it and give us feed back on the tool. When we’re really confident we’ve got all the logic right, and it’s clear enough, and when we’ve lined up volunteer projects around the country to represent authors whose transfers are to be terminated, we’ll launch the project.

Why is this a Creative Commons project? We’ve seen CC from the start as a tool to help creators manage an insanely complicated copyright system. When we have this running, we’ll offer any copyright owner who has reclaimed his or her rights the opportunity to distribute the work under a CC license. But that will be optional. Right now, we’re just offering the tool to make it simpler for authors to get what the copyright system was intended to give them. Continue reading →