Public Domain Works Celebrated in Poland

Michelle Thorne, January 9th, 2009

It’s after Three Kings Day, and after battling inboxes, CCi is back online and blogging. From our colleagues in CC Poland, some more exciting Public Domain Day news to ring in the New Year:

Poland’s Coalition for Open Education (KOED - Koalicja Otwartej Edukacji) has celebrated the Public Domain Day 2009 with a range of web-based actions and a press conference.

The Polish National Library, with the support of its director, dr. Tomasz Makowski, hosted talks about the public domain and related Polish projects at a press conference on Dec. 30. Bożena Michalska from the Nicolaus Copernicus University Library presented a list of over 500 authors whose works entered the public domain in Poland on 1st January 2009, based on the National Union Catalog NUKAT. Afterwards, Marek Siudym, a renowned Polish actor, recited a poem by Brunon Jasieński - a Polish futurist, who died in 1938 and who’s work is now in the public domain.

As a result of the well-attended conference, news of the Public Domain Day 2009 was published in a range of major media, including Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita dailies, Polish Public Radio, and the online portal Onet.

To coincide with the Public Domain Day 2009, Polish libraries have made available over a dozen works in their digital collections that are, as of January 1st 2009, in the public domain in Poland. A list of Polish works now in the public domain is maintained on the Coalition’s webpage.

The newly forged partnership, KOED, is striving to build and promote open educational resources in Poland. Bringing together common supporters of the Capetown Declaration principles, the Coalition is formed by one of CC Poland’s affiliate institutions, the Interdisciplinary Center for Modelling at University of Warsaw, and colleagues Wikimedia Polska Association, Foundation Modern Poland, and the Polish Librarians Association.

Lawrence Lessig on Colbert Nation Tonight

Fred Benenson, January 8th, 2009

Creative Commons’ founder, Lawrence Lessig has been recently talking about his new book, REMIX but tonight he’ll be appearing as the special guest on Colbert Nation, airing on Comedy Central at 11:30pm / 10:30c.

More information available on Colbert Nation, and streaming video of show should be available tomorrow, so keep an eye on our twitter and identi.ca accounts for links.

Thank you!

Joi Ito, January 7th, 2009

Joi Ito / Photo by Mizuka / CC BY

One week ago I asked for support in helping us reach our $500,000 goal. At that time, we had $12,000 left to raise with only 2 1/2 days left in the campaign, and we were all wondering how we were going to make it. Today, I’m proud to say that our community went above and beyond — raising CC a grand total of $525,383.73.

I want to send a special thank you to all of the individuals and companies that are long time supporters of CC. We’ve had hundreds of people continue to support CC over the years and I wish I could thank each and everyone of you publicly for your continued support. However, I don’t want to take up the entire CC main page, so please know how appreciated your commitment to CC is. To Digital Garage, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Tucows, Consumer Electronics Association, and wikiHow, thank you for your continued commitment to CC - I look forward to working with each of your companies in bringing more global awareness about CC, and I feel confident that together we will continue to enrich the digital commons we’re all investing in.

And to all the new individuals and new corporate supporters (Attributor, DotAsia, Ebay, Nevo Technologies, Safe Creative) - thank you for choosing to support CC this year. CC is only as strong as the community that supports it and we’re thrilled to see this community thriving. Think of all we can do over the next year by coming together and supporting each other.

I also want to take this opportunity to acknowledge the following companies and foundations who are committed to sustaining CC and the open movement. To the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla, IETSI, Red Hat, Google, and the Omidyar Network - thank you.

Thank you all from the bottom of my (and the rest of the CC staff’s) heart — we know how difficult it is right now and are deeply honored that you would choose to support CC this year. This doesn’t just help us continue our work but also reaffirms the growing strength of our community and the belief in a more fair and accessible digital world.

The CC staff, the board of directors, and I all look forward to what will surely be an exciting 2009.

- Joi

Jamendo CC music picks for 2008

Mike Linksvayer, January 7th, 2009

The critical and commercial success of Ghosts I-IV from Nine Inch Nails continues to amaze … also see Read Write Web, Ars Technica and Digg for additional comments on the album’s breakthrough.

This is a good opportunity to celebrate that the world of CC music is amazing for its depth and growth, not only for singular successes. One of many indicators is that Jamendo is on the cusp of reaching 15,000 openly licensed albums. They’ve put out a call for best of 2008 lists. It turns out fans have been building such lists all year, which is great, as discovery is the challenge.

My discovered on Jamendo in 2008 list follows. Except for the last track, you probably won’t enjoy this much, but that’s not the point — there are lots of other people discovering CC licensed music (at Jamendo and elsewhere) — follow them and you could be too. Or, if you share my taste in noise music…

KORIZA (Komitet Operativnoy Razrabotki Industrialnyh Zennostey Avangarda) from Saint Petersburg, Russia. They’ve released one experimental mathcore single, New Orlean Sunset Club that is deeply satisfying but a little too mellow. They are supposedly working on “new material, that will be much more experimental, vanguard & violent.” CAN’T WAIT.

Dr Pombo: Trastorno de la personalidad Rock electrónico psicodélico from Ermua, Spain. Recommed the track La mano de Dios.

Desarraigo of Ningúnlado (Nowhere), Mexico does very short, violent tracks with a drum machine, screaming, and GNU/Linux. On Polvo recommend Criadero De Polvo, which adds night sounds, a 46 second epic.

En Busca Del Pasto, an improvisational project from Madrid, Spain, has released 24 albums on Jamendo. Improvisación para dúo, Nº 4 («Pan y vino») is heavier on electronics and sampling than typical for EBDP. Parte segunda from that album is excellent.

Daniele Torelli of Reggio Emilia, Italy works with the electronic band Yue and put out We Don’t Care (single), a snappy little song.

Merci-Merci does lo-fi slow dance punk from La Rochelle, France. Souvenirs d’un océan disparu’s Océan Pacifique is a very pleasant listen.

Tom Fahy led a prolific group of musicians in St. John’s, Canada. Fahy died June of this year, a huge loss for music. The group’s output of 70 albums on Jamedo ranges stylistically from instrumental rock to jazz to classical, with many variations. Some recommendations include Endgame: A Tribute to Bobby Fischer, instrumental rock, hear Defence; Hotel, raga influenced jazz, Epilogue; Little Fatty: Studies in Atonality, classical, Little Fatty No. 1; and 1986, instrumental rock, Miss Rose Tells The Future.

Telemetrics Callsign 65:41 Noise and samples from Whitehouse, Ohio, USA. 25 minutes of easy on the ears listening.

Jamison Young, a musician and activist from Australia but based in Prague, Czech Republic, had a surprise this year from Shifting Sands Of A Blue Car when its Memories Child was featured in the X-Files: I Want to Believe movie. Not my usual type of music, but it grows on you. No reason for it to not be in heavy rotation on a supermarket PA near you.

Individual tracks listed above are assembled at http://www.jamendo.com/en/playlist/97841. All are available under CC BY or CC BY-SA.

New web metadata validator released

Asheesh Laroia, January 6th, 2009

(This was originally published on CC Labs.)

This past summer, Hugo Dworak worked with us (thanks to Google Summer of Code) on a new validator. This work was greatly overdue, and we are very pleased that Google could fund Hugo to work on it. Our previous validator had not been updated to reflect our new metadata standards, so we disabled it some time ago to avoid creating further confusion. The textbook on CC metadata is the “Creative Commons Rights Expression Language”, or ccREL, which specifies the use of RDFa on the web. (If this sounds like keyword soup, rest assured that the License Engine generates HTML that you can copy and paste; that HTML is fully compliant with ccREL.) We hoped Hugo’s work on a new validator would let us offer a validator to the Creative Commons community so that publishers can test their web pages to make sure they encode the information they intended.

Hugo’s work was a success; he announced in August 2008 a test version of the validator. He built on top of the work of others: the new validator uses the Pylons web framework, html5lib for HTML parsing and tokenizing, and RDFlib for working with RDF. He shared his source code under the recent free software license built for network services, AGPLv3.

So I am happy to announce that the test period is complete, and we are now running the new code at http://validator.creativecommons.org/. Our thanks go out to Hugo, and we look forward to the new validator gaining some use as well as hearing your feedback. If you want to contribute to the validator’s development or check it out for any reason, take a look at the documentation on the CC wiki.