Category Archives: creative commons

From Eric at CC:

Visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum‘s website to download “The Concert,” a new classical music podcast offered under the Creative Commons Music Sharing license. The podcast features unreleased live performances by master musicians and talented young artists recorded from the museum’s Sunday Concert Series. “The Concert” includes music by Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and Chopin for solo piano, orchestra, string quartet, and voice. A new podcast will be posted on the 1st and 15th of every month; users can subscribe to receive free, automatic updates delivered directly to their computers or mp3 players. With “The Concert,” the Gardner Museum becomes the first art museum to encourage sharing and free distribution of its online programming by using a Creative Commons license.

You can read more about this exciting news in CC’s press release.

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Creative Commons’ free software project, ccHost, a project that “provides web-based infrastructure to support collaboration, sharing, and storage of multi-media using the Creative Commons licenses and metadata,” has been named the “Best Open Source Solution” at LinuxWorld 2006. ccHost supports ccMixter. See some pictures of those who support ccHost. Continue reading →

CC Salon is happening tomorrow – Wednesday, August 9th – from 6-9pm at Shine in San Francisco. CC Salon is a free, casual monthly get-together focused on conversation, networking, and presentations from people or groups who are developing projects that relate to open content and tools. CC Salon SF is now being presented in conjunction with CopyNight SF.

This month’s line-up of speakers includes Hemai Parthasarathy and Barbara Cohen of the Public Library of Science, Owen Byrne of Digg, and John Buckman of Magnatune. Shannon Coulter will be DJing a set of CC music from Magnatune’s catalogue.

For more information, visit this event’s Upcoming.org listing.

So I’m back on the grid, after a (never long enough) break with my family. Nothing is as cool as my kid. And though returning is tough, this news was great to return to:

You’ll recall my over-the-top (but completely accurate) praise for Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. That was published by Yale University Press, which allowed Yochai to release the book under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license (you must give attribution, you can make only noncommercial uses of the work, and any derivative must be under the same license).

Today, Jack Balkin wrote to say that Yale has now permitted him to release his book, Cultural Software, under the same CC license. Balkin’s book (published in 1998) resolves a plainly more academic debate. But it uses metaphors from computer science to develop a theory of how cultures evolve. Balkin is a friend, and long before a friend, mentor for me. Nothing could make me happier than to see his great book within the CC family. Continue reading →

Phillipp Lenssen has written “55 Ways to Have Fun with Google”. The book is available for sale in book stores, and downloadable for free under a CC license. Continue reading →

At the iCommons iSummit in Rio, Revver demonstrated its technology. This company is a poster child for alternative ways to get creators paid. Videos are distributed under a CC license. At the end is an ad bug. When the video is played, the creators get paid. The creators of the video below (geniuses) have earned many many many thousands of dollars for this video. Watch, think, enjoy: (Innovation brought to you by the Neutral Net). (I’m experimenting with the feature of Revver that feeds revenue back to the syndicator. Anything I get will be donated to charity.) (And Michael is my new hero — thank you for the poster!)

Just got off the plane to Rio where we’re holding the second iCommons iSummit, so this is a bit delayed. But today, Microsoft has released a free Office plug-in that enables you to mark Office documents (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) with Creative Commons licenses. This has been in the works for a while, and is an extremely cool development. The plug-in will modify the FILE menu, adding an item “Creative Commons” and then when selected, link the user out to the CC site to select a license to be inserted into the license. The first document licensed with the tool is a speech by Brazil’s Culture Minister and supercool musician, Gilberto Gil, about tropicalism. (en) (pt).

Before I got on the plane yesterday, I was on some press calls about the announcement. Many were surprised CC and Microsoft would work together. Ever the naive law professor, that surprise surprises me. Office is a tool for creating. Giving the creator more control over that creativity is a way to make the Office platform more valuable to creators. And by incorporating CC licenses, more valuable to the public.

“But isn’t it strange for MSFT and Lessig to team-up?” I was asked. Well, I have yet gotten the team jersey, but no, it isn’t. Microsoft has been on the right side of a number of important issues — spectrum, net neutrality, identity — and I’m very glad they’re on the right side of this issue too. Giving creators the tools to mark their creativity with the freedoms they intend it to carry is a fantastically good thing to do.

“But it’s just for the Windows platform, isn’t it?” True enough. Now we need some enterprising sort to make a plug-in for Office on the Mac, as well as Garageband, OpenOffice, and many others. Let the competition begin. Continue reading →

Mathias Klang from the fantastically cool freculture country of Sweden (see my favorite, atmo.se, and very interesting (though you know my ambivalence about this word), Piracy Party) is publishing his PhD dissertation on Disruptive Technologies. He needs a cover design. So he’s running a competition. If you’re talented (or maybe even not!) and would like to help a PhD (which will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license), check out the competition here. Continue reading →

You know about Creative Commons, and Creative Commons licenses. Key to the CC strategy was to port Creative Commons licenses into jurisictions across the world. More than 30 countries have now launched CC licenses; another fifty in the works. As of the launch of Malta last week, this is CC world:

The green countries have already launched. The yellow countries will launch in the next six months. And the red countries are still, well, red.

This project of porting CC licenses we originally called the “iCommons Project.” But last year, we renamed the project Creative Commons International. iCommons became its own (UK-based) non-profit. In June of last year, we held the first iCommons Summit in Boston. In June of this year (23-25) we’ll hold the second — in Rio.

The aim of iCommons reaches far beyond the infrastructure that CC is building. The aim of the iSummit is to bring together a wide range of people in addition the CC crowd – including Wikipedians, Free Software sorts, the Free Culture kids, A2K heroes, Open Access advocates, and others — to “to inspire and learn from one another and establish closer working relationships around a set of incubator projects.” iCommons has a separate board from Creative Commons — Joi Ito is its chair — and its ultimate mission (in addition to this annual moveable feast of commons conversation) will be determined by the conversation that will continue in Rio.

The event will be extraordinary. Gilberto Gil will perform. Jimmy Wales will inspire. Joi Ito will direct. The only thing I can promise about me is that this year, I won’t be thrown into the pool.

So come. Or if you can’t, help others come by donating to the scholarship fund, or at least put our ‘donate button‘ on your website.

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Sun has made recent announcements about their openDRM project. In my view, they’ve made some commitments that are important for any DRM project. E.g., as I’ve seen it described, it would be implemented to allow individuals to assert “fair use,” and unlock DRM’d content, with a tag to trace misuse. And they’ve described a platform upon which authors keep the freedom to turn the DRM off, and more the content from the secured platform.

These are good things. But some confuse praise for better DRM with praise for DRM. So let me be as clear as possible here (though saying the same thing I’ve always said): We should be building a DRM-free world. We should have laws that encouraged a DRM-free world. We should demonstrate practices that make compelling a DRM-free world. All of that should, I thought, be clear. But just as one can hate the Sonny Bono Act, but think, if there’s a Sonny Bono Act, there should also be a Public Domain Enhancement Act, so too can one hate DRM, but think that if there’s DRM, it should be at least as Sun is saying it should be. Continue reading →