Creative Commons Concert in New York

Alex Roberts, November 28th, 2006

If you’ll be near New York City on September 29, please join us at Irving Plaza for the Creative Commons Concert presented by WIRED and Flavorpill. The show will feature Mike Patton’s experimental pop supergroup Peeping Tom, DJ/producer Diplo, and mash-up/remix artist Girl Talk. Proceeds from ticket sales will go to Creative Commons (please note that ticket price is not tax-deductible). The concert is a part of Next Music, which kicks off WIRED NextFest, a four-day festival featuring more than 130 interactive exhibits from scientists and researchers from around the world. Tickets are $25 each (plus service charge) and are available online at Ticketmaster.

Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft® Office

Alex Roberts, November 28th, 2006

Microsoft and Creative Commons have teamed up to release the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office, a copyright licensing tool that enables the easy addition of Creative Commons licenses to works created in popular Microsoft Office applications. The software is available free of charge at Microsoft Office Online and will enable the 400 million users of Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office Excel, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint to easily select Creative Commons licenses from directly within the application they are working in. The first document to be CC-licensed using this tool is the text of Brazilian Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil’s iSummit keynote speech in English and Portuguese.

Jonathan Coulton concert in Second Life

Alex Roberts, November 28th, 2006

Mark your calenders: On Thursday, September 14 at 5PM (SL/Pacific), PopSci.com (the online home of Popular Science) and Creative Commons will be hosting a special concert in Second Life featuring Jonathan Coulton as well as popular Second Life musicians Melvin Took, Kourosh Eusebio, Etherian Kamaboko, and Slim Warrior. The entire show will be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license, so feel free to record and share it. More information is available on this wiki.

Odd Job Jack

Alex Roberts, November 28th, 2006

You can catch the new season of the hilarious animated series Odd Job Jack — about a a temp worker’s myriad employment misadventures — on the Comedy Network in Canada. Better yet, make your own version of the hit cartoon! Odd Job Jack’s creators recently launched a site called Free Jack, in which the master Flash files and bitmaps of every piece of art used in this season of the show are being released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Share, reuse, and remix the files to your heart’s content!

Pearl Jam’s “Life Wasted” Video

Alex Roberts, November 28th, 2006

The new music video for Pearl Jam’s “Life Wasted” was released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs license, so that people anywhere can legally copy, distribute, and share the clip. This is the first Pearl Jam video to be released in eight years and the first video produced by a major label to be CC-licensed. You can download the video for free from several Web sites, and via BitTorrent by using the torrent file hosted by LegalTorrents.

Photo © Danny Clinch. Used with permission.

Scoopt

Alex Roberts, November 28th, 2006

Scoopt, the world’s first commercial citizen journalism photography agency, has just launched ScooptWords to help bloggers sell their content to newspapers and magazines. Within the Scoopt interface, you can easily add a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license to your blog right alongside a Scoopt commercial badge. Use the CC license to tell people how your work can be used non-commercially; use the ScooptWords badge to let editors know that your writing can be purchased for commercial use. There’s so much great blog content being created every day — it’ll be very exciting to see how it helps change the way newspapers and magazines are created.

Remix My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Alex Roberts, November 28th, 2006

David Byrne and Brian Eno’s landmark sampling album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was recently remastered and reissued with extensive liner notes, photos, and previously unreleased bonus tracks. To celebrate the release, Byrne and Eno launched bush-of-ghosts.com where the audio source files from two of the classic tracks from Bush of Ghosts — “A Secret Life” and “Help Me Somebody” — are offered under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, so you can (subject to the download terms of use) use them to make remixes. The site allows uploads and user ratings, as well as the ability to share videos you make for music on Bush of Ghosts.

Open Video Contest

Alex Roberts, November 28th, 2006

Creative Commons and the Fedora Project have teamed up for the Open Video Contest taking place now through August 20, 2006. To participate, submit a video that explores freedom and openness. Entries should be 30 seconds or less, in Ogg Theora format, and be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license. The winner will receive Fedora-branded Sony Camcorder and the first 150 submissions will receive a pair of handsome Fedora flip flops.

Música Lliure II

Alex Roberts, November 28th, 2006

Música Lliure II is a terrific new CD of Creative Commons-licensed jazz music by Catalan artists like Elisabet Raspall, Karion, Ismael Duenas, Joan Diaz, and La Orquesta de la Muerte (with a bonus contribution from Brazil’s Gilberto Gil). Produced by FOBSIC and Enderrock, the disc is available for free with the current issue of blues and jazz magazine Jaç. As with its predecessor, Música Lliure, the songs on Música Lliure II are available for free download at culturalliure.cat.

Música Lliure

Alex Roberts, November 28th, 2006

The April issue of Catalonian music magazine Enderrock includes a terrific article about Creative Commons and comes with a CD entitled Música Lliure, which features 19 CC-licensed songs from acts like Cheb Balowski, Dijous Paella, and Orxata Sound System. The CD’s bonus track, Gilberto Gil’s “Oslodum,” provides a sonic — and ideological — link to the Wired CD project, which Enderrock’s editors credit as their inspiration. You can download all of the music from Música Lliure for free at culturalliure.org.