Monthly Archives: December 2007

As we enter the final hours of the Support Creative Commons campaign (and here in California, we still have 9 hours left, so feel free to join in), we’ve exceeded our goal by almost 20%. I’m grateful to all for the support, especially the support coming just now. This has been a fantastic year. Continue reading →

ASCAP’s essay, “Common Understanding: 10 Things Every Music Creator Should Know About Creative Commons Licensing” nicely highlights some important considerations that any musician should review before using a CC license. Unfortunately, however, it also continues some common misunderstandings about Creative Commons. I’ve reprinted, and responded, to these in the extended entry below. But before the details, there is one important fact of agreement to keep in view, and one important disagreement:
We certainly agree with ASCAP that “music creators should fully understand the terms to which they are agreeing and the implications down the line.” That applies to CC licenses as much as to a recording contract. And we’re as keen as anyone to make sure that understanding is there.
But it is not the case that CC asserts that “artists should give up all or some of their rights” — if by that ASCAP means either that we believe giving up “all or some of their rights” always benefits an author or artists, or that, benefit notwithstanding, an artist should sacrifice his or her rights for the common good. Neither is correct. We know that sometimes, freer access helps. We provide tools to make it easier for artists to enable freer access. We also believe that when making creative work freely available doesn’t hurt, and sometimes helps, the culture is benefited by choosing freedom rather than licensing lawyers. And finally, we believe that some forms of creative work — e.g., the work of scientists, or governments — should be freely available. But that normative claim is far from the work we do with the authors or artists that ASCAP deals with. Our business with respect to them is not to exhort them to charity. Artists and authors have it bad enough without a bunch of nerdy lawyer-types trying to pile on more guilt.
Now to the end of correcting some misunderstandings, the corrections of what ASCAP has said: Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

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! Continue reading →

By Tama Lever at Flickr,


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.
Continue reading →