Category Archives: creative commons

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.
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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! Continue reading →

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.
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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. Continue reading →

RSVP. Continue reading →

As reported at Blognation, German Public Television has started an experiment by licensing two of its shows under a CC license.
For German speakers (and last week, my 4 year old informed me I was not a German speaker and I “should only speak English”), here’s a clip explaining the decision:

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To celebrate its 5th birthday (Dec 15), Creative Commons is launching a drive to get 50,000 friends. From the CC Blog:

Through sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr, you can help us broaden our reach and educate the masses about the Creative Commons mission.
So, starting today, we’re issuing a 50,000 friend challenge to our community. We’reasking you to help us expand CC’s overall friend network to 50,000 people across the Web’s various social networking and content sharing sites by December 15 – the date of our fifth birthday party.
Here are some ways you can help our friend network grow. If you aren’t a member of any of these sites, please help us by starting (or expanding) a CC group on any site you do use.

• Join our Facebook Cause, become a top recruiter, or become a CC Fan
• Participate in the 2007 CC Swag photo contest on Flickr
• Become a Creative Commons friend on MySpace or Friendster

Of course, you can also help Creative Commons by contributing to our annual fundraising campaign. As always, we thank you sincerely for your support!

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Some of you have seen the fantastic site we built at CC called “ccMixter.” Launched after Wired released a CD which invited people to remix CC licensed music, ccMixter has built a community of remix artists. Thousands of tracks within a system that tracks who remixed what. So, e.g., the technology enables you to say “this track was made by remixing these three tracks, and it has been remixed by these four other tracks.” Making transparent the community that is remix, on a platform of CC licensed content.
We launched ccMixter as a demonstration project. As with all our demonstrations, we expected eventually it would spin out to something self-sustaining. How and whether we do that with ccMixter is now something we’re beginning to consider. We’ve asked the ccMixter community about their thoughts about a change. (You can read the missive I sent to them last night in the Extended Entry below). But I wanted to state here some important framing values about this that will not change.
We are considering this change because we want ccMixter to flourish. We could likely continue to support it as it is. It’s not cheap, but it isn’t terribly expensive. We’ve been very lucky to have a brilliant musician and technologist (Victor Stone) incubate the project. I’m sure we could persuade him to continue.
But if the ccMixter community is really to flourish, it needs support beyond the support a nonprofit can provide. So we’re considering how we might permit that support to be secured.
Here are the principles that will guide this change:

1. CC will not profit off of CC artists: We’re not an agency; we will set up no arrangement where the success of CC artists translates into financial success for CC. We’re happy to receive gifts from our community; we’re not about to receive commissions. We are therefore keen to restructure ccMixter so that any commercial benefit flowing to CC artists won’t seem an indirect benefit to CC.
2. ccMixter will never lose its current commerce-free face. It will always be “free” in both the costless and free-speech sense. It will never have ads. It will always be a .org. The community that exists there now can continue just as it exists now. No one will have to make any change to how they contribute to the ccMixter community, if no change is what they want.
3. Any change in ccMixter will be completely transparent, and only with the support of its community. The transparent part of this is simple. The support of the community part is complicated by fiduciary obligations imposed upon a non-profit like CC. But we will work hard to make sure that we do only what the community believes (properly interpreted of course) makes sense. Our ultimate aim here is to enable more for that community. We achieve that aim by understanding it.
4. All the software and creative work will always remain “free”: First, the (award winning) code is free (licensed under the GPL); we will contribute the copyrights to that code to the GNU Project as soon as we can convince RMS of the capabilities of the maintainer. Second, the music is free (all licensed under terms that permit at least noncommercial sharing and remix).

I’m sure there will be more that I add to this list as we work through this. But I’d welcome other comments in the comment section to this post. We’ve not done something like this before. We need lots of eyeballs to make sure we do it right. Continue reading →

As reported today, Peter Gabriel and the Witness project have launched a site, The Hub, to focus attention on human rights violations. “Users are advised to publish contents under a Creative Commons license.” Continue reading →

Use it wisely. Continue reading →