Category Archives: creative commons

The Pet Rock Stars have completed two songs from the blogathon. As previously reported, the work in progress, and the final songs were posted under a Creative Commons license. Within a day, their creativity has sparked other creativity. Erik Ostrom has posted a cover of Southdown, one of the two songs the Pet Rock Stars wrote. Here are the two songs Shannon Campbell and Scott Andrew wrote: Southdown and Nothing New. Here’s Scott’s take on all this re-creativity. And here is the song Erik Ostrom made: Stork Carpets. Continue reading →

This is a great story about the creativity possible when control is relaxed. Whenever I read these stories, I have an odd dejavu to the days of Gorbachev: The Soviet Union would relax its controls, and people would write stories about how freedom actually increased innovation and creativity. The Soviet officials were amazed and surprised. But what’s amazing to me is that we’re surprised when we learn the same thing here.

UPDATE: I was whining about something re the Times that Dave Winer has solved. I apologize. Continue reading →

So one of the million things I’ve not had time to do while finishing this draft (answering a b’gillion emails is another) was to listen to this. As I described before, Colin Mutchler posted a guitar track to Opsound. Opsound makes its content available to others under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike license. Cora Beth, a 17 year old violinist, took the track and added a violin track. The result is this.

As Brian Flemming commented on the post, “a great way to illustrate the value of CC to someone who perhaps doesn�t quite get it.” Indeed it is. Listen to this, and you’ll can’t help but get it. Continue reading →

There’s a great example of how Creative Commons works on its blog. A clip: “About a month after submitting a few acoustic guitar tracks to Opsound’s sound pool [and thus releasing the song under an Attribution-ShareAlike license], I got an email from a violinist named Cora Beth, who had added a violin track�to one of the guitar tracks…”

This is getting very cool. Continue reading →

You build the hard stuff, and we’ll build the middle ground (“Some Rights Reserved)”). As you know, we’ve been planning our Conservancy Project for sometime, and are eager to find the right code/protocol/content to fuel its launch. Continue reading →

As most no doubt know, Dave has brought weblogs to Harvard’s Berkman Center, which is extraordinarily great news. Today the Harvard weblog adopted the Creative Commons technology for expressing just how free their weblog content is. More great news. Martin Schwimmer, trademark and ICANN maven, is struggling with the same issues�though he chose words to say what the CC license says with code. And now, I learn, he will use CC licenses as well.

Alas, weaning the lawyers from their words proves harder than the programmers. Maybe the generation of lawyers that Dave influences will be different. Continue reading →

Cory Doctorow’s brilliant novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, is out today. Buy it early and often. Cory’s book is also the very first to be offered initially both for sale and under a CreativeCommons license. That means you can also download it for free. As Cory describes it,

“The entire text of my novel is available as a free download in a variety of standards-defined formats. No crappy DRM, no teasers, just the whole damned book.”

But as he (and I) expect, once you start the book, you’ll see you want it in its bound form. So again, you might as well buy it too.

Cory has been defending the rights of creators at EFF for sometime now. With this experiment, he is putting his money where his heart is. I’ve had enormous respect for him for a very long time, but I’m quickly discovering new heights of respect.

Congratulations, Cory, on a great novel, made available to the world freely � and with great CC metadata to boot!

Check out the CC Weblog later today for an interview with Cory about the novel, and his ideas about licensing. Continue reading →

Bruce Perens has extraordinarily great news about a deal he’s struck with Prentice Hall to permit “open source” publication of a series of books. It was no surprise that Tim O’Reilly got the value of adding work to the commons (as O’Reilly press has with a bunch of titles donated to the public domain and a bunch of content to be licensed under a CC license: read here). But it is a real testament to Bruce’s skill that he convinced Prentice Hall. Congratulations. I only hope we can help make the licenses part of the semantic web. Continue reading →

Matt Haughey is one of the creators who helped make Creative Commons happen. He’s built an amazingly cool site called ticketstubs that enables people to share stories around events. Continue reading →

So Peter Wayner reports that after he put his book, Free for All, under a Creative Commons license, the price for used books at Amazon has gone up by 40%. RIAA (or better, artists the RIAA is supposed to represent): Take note. Continue reading →