We have also released a great mapping tool for identifying upcoming open educational events, now found on ccLearn’s home page. What is unique about this tool is that the data are derived from a wiki-table, and anyone can contribute or edit event info. We encourage you to add any events relevant to open education that you may be aware of. We intend to re-purpose this tool for other mapping exercises as well, and since it is open source, like everything Creative Commons builds, you can also use it for your own mapping needs. One idea that has already been discussed is “mapping the open educational space” at the upcoming iSummit… this exercise could take many forms, and the open, collaborative nature of the wiki allows for a lot of creativity in how the map takes shape.

Look for other developments and research projects to come to fruition in the coming month. The days are getting shorter here in the Northern Hemisphere, but the fire season has just begun.

-Ahrash

“then you win” is an initiative aiming to release a series of documentaries that focus on international development issues under a spectrum of CC licenses. The documentaries are produced by Loin de l’Œil, a voluntary association in France, and will be released under Yooook, an open content platform project under development run by Camille Harang. You can read more about the project here.

With active donations, “then you win” will move these documentaries from All Rights Reserved into more open licenses - from BY-NC-ND to BY-NC-SA to BY-SA. The more money donated to the project, the more open these documentaries become. The hope is that with a more open license (the project is already powered by a suite of open source solutions) the documentaries will gain more exposure, greatly increasing the impact they are able to achieve.

We’ve received numerous questions since posting the RFP, which we’ve distilled into the Q&A below.

Before getting to the Q&A, check out (or come back to) some cool ccMixter and related developments over the last month: new site features galore, new developer features, a call for remixes from Shannon Hurley, a new weekly show featuring MC Jack in the Box’s ccMixter picks and of course lots of great new music.

ccMixter RFP Q&A

Why is CC doing this?

This is answered clearly (if dryly) in the RFP (emphasis added):

ccMixter.org was launched by CC in November 2004 to demonstrate legal mixing and reuse of music content, one area in which CC licenses have found firm footing and support. CC believes that ccMixter.org has fulfilled its initial mission of concretely demonstrating “legal reuse.” However, running a community music site is not one of CC’s core competencies, and accordingly, CC’s Board of Directors has decided that ccMixter should be transitioned to another person or entity with the necessary resources and expertise for ccMixter to continue to grow and reach its full potential.

In other words, we think ccMixter has the potential to “blow up” — in the right hands.

Does CC own all IP contained in proposals?

No. Section 3.2(c) of the RFP says, “All RFP responses, supporting materials, and other documentation submitted with responses will become the property of CC.” Our intent is not that CC become the owner or assignee of any intellectual property conceptualized or contained in a proposal response, only that CC needs to retain a record and copy of everything that’s submitted (for audit purposes, etc.).

What did Lessig really mean by “free”, “no ads”, “.org”, and “no variances”?

Appendix B to the RFP restates (verbatim) the criteria articulated by Larry Lessig for spinning out ccMixter to a new home.

“Free” means the entity does have to provide current ccMixter services at no charge, but does not prohibit it from providing “pro” services to users at another, related site. The related site can be linked to from the ccMixter website.

“No ads” means the free ccMixter site cannot have ads.

“.org” means the site will be served from a “.org” domain, but more importantly, have a “no ads” face, though the site content could be served from other domains as well, consistent with the license(s) the content falls under.

“No variances” will be considered from the spirit of the principles Larry articulated, but admittedly those principles leave some room for interpretation. We may need to refine those points in negotiation depending on the ideas contained in the proposals. But the over-arching and guiding intent is to ensure the ccMixter website remains a community environment where remixers can do their thing, legally, and not suffer abuse or feel that the essence of their community or the terms governing their participation have changed. We’re happy to review proposal ideas and drafts and provide feedback on whether the direction envisioned is tenable. This isn’t a matter of throwing one over the transom and hoping it isn’t immediately disqualified … if you’re interested in submitting a proposal, let’s talk.

What is the activity level of the site?

Probably the best window into how the site is used is on the ccMixter stats page.

Over the last 30 days, ccMixter has 333,871 pageviews in 58,158 visits from 39,234 visitors (according to Google Analytics).

Alexa, Compete.com, and Quantcast provide publicly available traffic indicators.

How much does it cost to run ccMixter?

The technical answer is that the site currently runs on one box, currently hosted at ServerBeach for $229/month, including bandwidth (2000GB/month). A <$10/month Dreamhost account is used to help with bandwidth. The other cost, much larger, has been its people. That basically means Victor (who has to date performed services at well below market rate) and a small amount of legal/finance/hr/management overhead from CC.

All this said, the question we encourage proposers to be thinking about is not “what does it cost CC, a non profit, to run ccMixter today?” The circumstances of our development and maintenance of the site in its current form should only inform, not drive or be relied upon in determining, costs going forward.

The question you really should be asking is “what would ccMixter cost [your name here] to run?”, which will be largely determined by your vision for its future.

The reason is simple. For almost every case, the current cost to CC does not translate to what ccMixter would cost somebody because the CC infrastructure of lawyers, accountants, tech staff, etc. would all need to replicated. And the “market value” of the very valuable work Victor performs at a cut rate for CC almost certainly will not translate to your real world scenario.

So the answer to this inquiry really depends in what kind of infrastructure you have at your organization, and even more importantly on your vision and plans for the site.

…

Remember, proposals are due July 29 to ccmixter-rfp@creativecommons.org! Please read the RFP carefully if you are considering submitting.

Check out the digital copyright slider. The tool itself is pretty simple. You basically slide the arrow up and down the years starting from “Before 1923″. The boxes on the left (Permission Needed? and Copyright Status/Term) tell you whether a work is still copyrighted or whether it’s now in the public domain, free for you to use and repurpose any way you like. Unfortunately, actually figuring out the copyright status of a work isn’t so simple as dragging your mouse—most of the years seem to be marked by a fuzzy period of “Maybe”. For example, say John Doe wrote and published a poem between 1964-1977 and you are able to find a copyright notice—you still can’t really figure out whether the copyright still applies. And if you can’t find a copyright notice? Well, you just don’t know then either. The same answer (don’t know) seems to apply to a lot of years here…

Props to the ALA for illuminating the incredible complications in US copyright (yeah, that’s right—this sliding scale also only applies to works published within the US). And double props for licensing their tool CC BY-NC-SA. I leave you now with this thought:

Photo licensed CC BY-NC by Nancy

Prominent Free Culture activist, ROFLCon-ite, and close CC friend Dean Jansen blogged recently about Archive.org’s new absolutely amazingly easy-to-use new interface for uploading media. As he writes,

This is great news, as Archive.org has historically been notoriously difficult to publish to. I’m encouraging them to go one step further and add easily accessible RSS links (with media enclosures) for users, categories, searches and so forth. This will turn Archive.org into an amazing free 1-stop (non-profit) publishing platform for independent podcasters and video bloggers alike.

Very cool. It currently only works for things less than 100 MB, and for anything larger, there’s the Creative Commons Publisher Tool. Check it out!

3 weeks ago we had an amazing experience putting on the CC Salon LA. Presenters Curt Smith and Monk Turner spoke eloquently about why they have used CC and it seemed a shame that their words were constricted solely to the space of FOUND Gallery. Thankfully we recorded the presentations and, after editing for brevity, we were able to post them online. Check them out below:

Curt Smith’s Presentation:

• vimeo
• blip.tv
• youtube

Monk Turner’s Presentation:

• vimeo
• blip.tv
• youtube

All the videos are released under a CC BY license and you can download them in their raw format at either vimeo or blip.tv. Similarly, we will be posting the unedited presentations to Archive.org in the coming days. You can also see a Flickr photoset of the night.

CC Salons are one of the best ways we have found for people to better understand how CC works and what we do - hopefully by taking these presentations online, they can educate an even wider audience.

Joi already beat me to the punch in blogging about this and posted up a video. If you head over to my site or Joi’s and you can see also the video that Loic shot with me at the CC office in San Francisco yesterday.

And, if you head over to Seesmic’s main page right now, they have a community video discussion with a fair use and copyright expert (~3:30 PM PST).

Tim “ROFLcon” Hwang and I have been working with Seesmic to add this over the last few weeks and they rocked it out pretty quick! Joanne and Loic followed up with me noting where they added CC support, which is cool for others in similar position to note as well because Seesmic relies heavily at present on Flash video (like Youtube and others) and Flash-based interface elements:

• Either logged in or out you see a link where it says’s Some Rights Reserved at www.seesmic.com
• When a community member goes to post a video there is a small icon that defaults to the Attribution license, but one may click, scroll down to see the other license options and learn more.
• Community members also access CC on their profile page and in the embeddable player, where the license option links out to the selected CC license deed page.
• You can read more about our announcement at http://blog.seesmic.com/.
• Also added to CC our Terms of Service (ToS) with links to CC’s site where appropriate: http://www.seesmic.com/docs/TOS.html

As such, IANAL, and CC doesn’t provide legal support. These are just notes on how Seesmic has integrated CC licensing.

CC integration should be rewarded with traffic, right! Head on over there and start posting videos. Oh, and if you want to know the verb form of Seesmic, its to Seesmic.

Credit: Justine Ungaro, CC BY

Can you give us a bit of background on your musical/artistic trajectory? Many of our readers may be familiar with Tears for Fears, the band you gained notoriety in, but may be less familiar with your equally impressive solo career. Please speak to both.

Roland and I have been in bands together since we were 13 years old. We signed our first record deal at 18 with a band called Graduate, which lasted all of a year until we decided we didn’t like being in a band and left to form Tears For Fears. I left the band in 1990 as I wasn’t enjoying it any more and moved to New York.

After a few years on the periphery of the industry, in radio and TV, I met Charlton Pettus through a mutual friend. He convinced me to start writing and performing again and a band called Mayfield was born. The idea was to get back to the basics and rediscover the pure enjoyment and musicianship that attracted me to this career in the first place. We primarily played in New York and released an album cunningly entitled “Mayfield”.

In 1998 my wife’s work brought us to Los Angeles, Charlton would follow about a year later. Around the time of the birth of my first daughter in 1999 I started writing the songs for what would later become “Halfway, pleased”.

In 2000 I was approached by Roland to do another Tears For Fears album together. After a few meetings I agreed which culminated in the 2004 release “Everybody Loves A Happy Ending”. During this period “Halfway, pleased” was put on the shelf.

It was 2006 by the time all the promoting and touring was finished on the TFF project, at that point Charlton and I went back to finishing “Halfway, pleased”. As the title suggests, it’s an autobiographical work about where I find myself in life at this moment - halfway through and pleased.

Your most recent album, “Halfway, Pleased” was released on your own without the help of a record label. How have you found the process of moving away from traditional music industry principles, being someone who has released numerous albums through a major label.

At this point in my career, and with the freedom that the internet allows, I saw no point in involving a large corporation in the process. I value my artistic freedom too much and don’t see the logic in giving away any ownership of my music to a major corporation whose influence on the music scene is slowly becoming irrelevant.

Why did you choose to release “Halfway, Pleased” under a CC license? Was the the motivation artistic, economical, ethical, or some mixture therein?

I’d have to pick logical. It allows me to set the legal parameters of how my music can be used up front without the ridiculous expense of hiring a lawyer. Finally someone has come along and introduced a copyright system that everyone can understand. I don’t need a lawyer to write it and the public doesn’t need lawyers to decipher it.

Do you have anything in the works that you’d like our readers to know about? What is up next for you?

At the moment I’m spending my time promoting “Halfway, pleased”. I’m also making inroads into the film and TV music world as it’s something I would really like to be involved with. In November/December this year I will be touring in Germany with TFF backed by a 75 piece orchestra and The Harlem Boys Choir. Basically my tenet is that I’ll keep doing it as long as I’m enjoying it. Right now it’s fun.

Today, Radiohead released a video for its song “House of Cards.” Directed by James Frost, it’s a beautiful, eerie clip, made with - wait for it - lasers (!), instead of cameras or lights.

[T]wo technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

“Awesome,” you say. “But why am I reading about it on the Creative Commons blog?”

Glad you asked. The animation data used to make the video are licensed to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license at Google Code. This means you are free to use the data to make your own video projects, as long as you abide by the CC license’s conditions. (To be clear, the song and its accompanying video are not under CC license; the data used to make the video are.)

Very exciting stuff. We can’t wait to see all the interesting ways people use this material.

Tribe of Noise is using this license so the community can discover new music and develop new relationships with the participating artists.

The artists that participate with Tribe of Noise will have many benefits including a personalized webshop along with legal and technical support in the future.  Participating with this project, as a user or artist, will help advance new methods of music creation along with appreciation and new plans for financial sustainability.