Malaysian Artistes for Unity

Michelle Thorne, May 20th, 2008

pete was juggling tomatoes. bored. so he telephoned a few friends instead. “how about getting together to make an anti-racism song and music video?” all said yes without hesitation. not because pete threatened them with a rusty knife. only because they love malaysia.

And so began Malaysian Artistes For Unity, a collaboration which has since swelled to over 150 active members working with creative, non-partisan projects to build awareness and tolerance in Malaysia.

The group, in close partnership with Creative Commons Malaysia, has released a lovely video to share their cause. Shot in Kuala Lumpur and co-directed by Yasmin Ahmad, the video features a colorful cast of well-known Malaysian artists singing “Here In My Home,” a song written and co-produced by Pete Teo from CC Malaysia’s board of directors. The text is in four languages and speaks to the diversity and vibrancy of Malaysia’s cultural communities.

The video and audio files are available to download under CC BY-NC-ND and CC BY-NC-SA. Furthermore, Unleash Creativity for UNITY, a spin-off project by Muid Latif and Digital Malaya, has been developed to encourage CC-licensed remixes of the video and other works to share and spread art in Malaysia.

Creative Commons 1979

Mike Linksvayer, May 18th, 2008

Denver Gingerich writes about a 1979 feature article about copyright that appeared in the University of Waterloo’s Gazette:

I found it especially neat that the Gazette includes this note: “Editorial material may be reprinted freely; credit would be appreciated.” This seems similar in intent to the Creative Commons Attribution license (possibly with a No Derivative Works clause). From what I’ve seen of recent newspapers, a license that allows free
redistribution is seldom used anymore. I wonder why that is.

Denver put the whole feature on his website.

Previously: Creative Commons 868 and 1967.

Grant Competition to Support CC Licensing Adoption in the South Caucasus

Michelle Thorne, May 16th, 2008

We are very honored to announce that our close collaborators, the Eurasia Partnership Foundation, has opened a grant competition to support the adoption of the Creative Commons licensing framework in the countries of the South Caucasus.

Proposals may be submitted for Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan,

From their website:

The initiative seeks to enable and popularize the legal sharing and reuse of cultural, educational, and scientific works in the countries of the South Caucasus through offering free and easy-to-use Creative Commons (CC) licensing framework to creators, artists, and educators, as well as other internet-based communities in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. These goals will be achieved through exploring possibilities for implementing a consistent, robust and internationally accepted framework for intellectual property rights for web-based materials in the South Caucasus, adapting Creative Commons framework to conditions in the South Caucasus, and ensuring extensive stakeholder involvement and broad public awareness of the CC framework in the South Caucasus.

The deadline for applications in Georgia is May 29, 17:00, and a general pre-bid consultation seminar will be held at the EPF offices in Yerevan, Armenia on May 19, 17:00.

Modiba Productions Presents Nation Beat Animation Contest

Cameron Parkins, May 13th, 2008

Nation Beat, a musical group that “bridges folkloric Brazilian rhythms with classic American roots music”, is set to release their sophomore album, Legends of the Preacher, on July 15th 2008. In conjunction with their release, Nation Beat and record label Modiba Productions are sponsoring an animation contest based on the band and their songs, with the animation assets released under a CC BY-NC license. From Nation Beat/Modiba Productions:

Entrants are asked to submit 60-90 second animated music video shorts featuring a track of their choice. Modiba will offer files from the album’s original artwork featuring the band members as cartoon characters. The files will be offered in both InDesign and Flash formats, and will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license, so that they can be used in animated videos by contestants. In addition to the $500 cash prize, the winning video will be featured on NationalGeographic.com, Nation Beat and Modiba’s websites, Myspace pages, and a variety of other media outlets.

To submit an entry, participants must upload their finalized videos to YouTube and send a link to info AT modiba DOT net. By CC licensing the animation assets, Nation Beat and Modiba Productions are able to facilitate an interactive and user-friendly means for fans to engage with Legends of the Preacher, all while retaining their commercial rights. This allows Nation Beat the ability to license their music outside of the competition and provides a means for enhanced fan interaction, two vital, yet often difficult to reconcile, methods of music promotion.

search.creativecommons.org screencast and i18n

Mike Linksvayer, May 12th, 2008

We’ve rolled out a few small changes to search.creativecommons.org:

• The part of the interface we control is now translatable, and has five languages enabled now — Afrikaans, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), English, and Japanese. You can suggest translations here.
• A screencast on using ccSearch with Firefox, including how to change your default search engine, and change it back.
• Run a default search when the user switches search tabs with no query entered.

You can browse and checkout the code (GPL licensed) from our source repository.

Further improvements we’re thinking about (patches welcome; see source info above):

• Conditionally show search engine tabs based on language. This requires us to learn of more CC-enabled search sites that allow filtering on license terms by changing the query URL. Look at (and add to) our wiki page on ccSearch integration for details.
• Conditionally show search engine tabs based on user preference.
• Provide some contextual help when user switches tabs without entering a query rather than running a default search.
• A complete re-thinking of the interface, including the possibility of a unified metasearch instead of search engine tabs.

Remember, the code is available and GPL’d, so you can run your own version (modulo our trademark policy) in addition to helping us improve ours.