Press Releases
Paul Brest Named Creative Commons Chair
Read the full press release. (PDF)
I’m delighted to announce that Paul Brest has been elected chair of the Creative Commons board. Paul will begin as chair in December, coinciding with CC’s tenth anniversary celebrations.
Throughout his career, Paul has bridged the worlds of law, philanthropy, and academia, most recently as president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and, before that, dean of Stanford Law School. He’s widely recognized as an expert on constitutional law, problem solving and decision making, and philanthropic strategy, having written books and taught classes at Stanford on these subjects.
I can’t think of a better choice than Paul. He has that rare combination of strong instincts and the knowledge and rigor to back those instincts up. He’s the leader we need to carry CC into the next decade.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to recognize Joi Ito for his years of service as chair. During Joi’s time as chair, he’s helped CC grow as an organization, both in global influence and in its relevance to a changing technology landscape.
Please join me in thanking Joi and welcoming Paul.
2 Comments »500px Announces Creative Commons Licensing Options
Read the full press release. (PDF)
This morning, photo-sharing platform 500px announced that it now offers Creative Commons licensing options. 500px has become a hub for talented photographers in recent years, and it’s great to see it join the ranks of CC-enabled platforms.
From the press release:
“While our platform still defaults to full copyright protection as it always has, we want to give our photographers as much flexibility as possible to spread their work and build their profiles and businesses,” says Oleg Gutsol, CEO, 500px. “Our move to offer Creative Commons licensing is another way we’re providing additional services and value to meet the needs of our growing community.”
With tens of millions of high quality professional photos potentially now available through Creative Commons, 500px is planning for the increased traffic from bloggers, publishers and media outlets that have been clamoring to get at the content for several years.
“We’ve built content searching by keywords and applicable license right into the functionality,” says Gutsol. “Our hope is that this targeted searching makes it seamless for people to find the content they’re looking for.”
With this rollout, 500px joins the ranks of other prominent rich media communities such as Vimeo, SoundCloud and YouTube who already have Creative Commons in place.
No Comments »“500px is a great addition to the family of CC-compatible media platforms,” Creative Commons CEO Cathy Casserly said. “500px caters to a talented and intelligent community of photographers, just the sort of users we’re always excited to see licensing their work under CC. I’ll be curious to see how creative people everywhere reuse and remix the work of 500px photographers.”
Using Free and Open Educational Resources to Support Women and Girls in STEM
Mountain View, CA and Cambridge, MA — Creative Commons and the OpenCourseWare Consortium announce the formation of a task force to determine how open educational resources (OER) can support the success of girls and women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) in support of the Equal Futures Partnership, announced on September 24 by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“The gender gap in participation in STEM areas around the world is significant,” said Cathy Casserly, CEO of Creative Commons. “We need to address the barriers to girls’ success in STEM to ensure that the future is filled with bright, ambitious, well-educated people of both genders who are able to contend with future global challenges.”
The OER-STEM task force will examine how OER can attract and support girls in STEM education, including additional support services necessary to ensure high levels of success. OER are high-quality educational materials that are openly licensed and shared at no cost, allowing learners and educators to use, adapt, change and add information to suit their education goals. The task force will include experts in STEM education for girls and women along with experts in OER to determine specific projects that will advance achievement in these important areas.
“We are seeking innovative support solutions for girls to succeed in STEM subjects using open educational resources,” said Mary Lou Forward, Executive Director of the OpenCourseWare Consortium. “Since OER can be accessed freely by anyone, anywhere, and modified to fit different cultural contexts and learning needs around the world, we are looking at this issue from a global perspective.”
About Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a globally-focused nonprofit organization dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. Creative Commons provides free licenses and other legal tools to give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions and get credit for their creative work while allowing others to copy, distribute and make specific uses of it.
About the OpenCourseWare Consortium
The OpenCourseWare Consortium is an international group of hundreds of institutions and organizations that support the advancement open sharing in higher education. The OCW Consortium envisions a world in which the desire to learn is fully met by the opportunity to do so anywhere in the world, where everyone, everywhere is able to access affordable, educationally and culturally appropriate opportunities to gain whatever knowledge or training they desire.
3 Comments »Announcing the Liberated Pixel Cup: an epic contest for gaming freedom
We’re pleased to announce the launch of the Liberated Pixel Cup, a free-as-in-freedom game authoring competition being launched in cooperation between Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation, and OpenGameArt!
Liberated Pixel Cup example outdoor artwork / Lanea Zimmerman / CC BY-SA 3.0
Liberated Pixel Cup is a two-part competition: make a bunch of awesome free culture licensed artwork, and program a bunch of free software games that use it. Hopefully many cool projects can come out of this… but that will only happen if people like you get involved!
Technically the project will run in three phases. One of the major goals of the project is for the community to be able to produce content that’s stylistically consistent. To that end, “phase zero” of the project is to produce a style guide that people can work off to produce content that meshes together nicely, something along the lines of what the Tango style guide does for icons. We’ve been working with a few excellent artists to commission a base example set to build the style guide out of, and we’re fairly thrilled with where things are going!
Liberated Pixel Cup example indoor artwork / Lanea Zimmerman / CC BY-SA 3.0
And this is where you come in: “Phase one” of the competition will then be building artwork that matches that guide that should then be uploaded to OpenGameArt and dual licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 and GPLv3. This part of the project will run from June 1st through June 30th. “Phase two” of this competition will be building GPLv3 or later games that incorporate artwork from the artwork building phase of the project. People can work in teams or individually, and this portion of the contest will run from July 1st through July 31st.
Afterwards will be judging entries and handing out awards. We’re planning on giving out some prizes for both the content building and the game programming phases. To see more details about all this, check out the rules page.
We’re very proud to be working on this collaboration with OpenGameArt, but especially the Free Software Foundation, a true ally of ours in the quest for user freedom in all domains. And it seems that feeling is mutual:
The FSF is happy to join with our peers and support this contest. We’re already excited about the new free software games that will come out of it — not only because we like games, but because this is an area that is still very much in the grips of proprietary software companies using nasty Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), and an area holding back free software adoption for many users.
– John Sullivan, Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation
We think Liberated Pixel Cup is a great opportunity for the commons in many ways! Right now it’s hard to find free culture content to bootstrap games that match a consistent style and hard for artists to collaborate on such. We’re also very interested in areas where free software and free culture directly intersect, which we don’t always see enough of (and which sometimes can even get a bit complex, so it’s good to have opportunities to think about them when we can), and games are a great example of this overlap. We hope you’ll participate!
And on that note, there’s several things we’d like to fund with this project. First of all, we’d like to pay the artists that have we’ve commissioned for this style guide actual money, as laying down a set of fundamentals for the artwork is a lot of serious work. Second, we’d like to be able to do cool things like give out prizes for people who win the various stages of the competition.
To that end, we’re trying to raise some money for the Liberated Pixel Cup. So please help make that happen, and donate today!
About Creative Commons
Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org) is a globally-focused nonprofit organization dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. Creative Commons provides free licenses and other legal tools to give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions and get credit for their creative work while allowing others to copy, distribute and make specific uses of it. Donations to support Creative Commons work can be made at https://creativecommons.net/donate/ and also by contacting development@creativecommons.org.
Contact
Christopher Allan Webber
Senior Software Engineer
Creative Commons
+1 (773) 614 2279
cwebber@creativecommons.org
About the Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users’ right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software — particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants — and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites, located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF’s work can be made at http://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.
Contact
Joshua Gay
Campaigns Manager
Free Software Foundation
+1 (617) 542 5942
campaigns@fsf.org
About OpenGameArt
OpenGameArt.org was founded in 2009 for the purpose of archiving art for use in free and open source games. Since then, OGA has grown into a vibrant community of artists and developers who are passionate about games and free culture. You can join the community or explore by visiting http://opengameart.org/.
Contact
Bart Kelsey
Founder, OpenGameArt.org
bart@opengameart.org
Launch of the Why Open Education Matters Video Competition
Mountain View, California and Washington, D.C., — March 5, 2012
Today Creative Commons, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Open Society Institute announce the launch of the Why Open Education Matters Video Competition. The competition will award cash prizes for the best short videos that explain the use and promise of free, high-quality Open Educational Resources—or “OER”—and describe the benefits and opportunities these materials create for teachers, students and schools.
Video submissions are accepted until June 5, 2012 and winners will be announced July 18, 2012. Cash prizes, provided by the Open Society Institute, include $25,000 (first), $5,000 (second), and $1,000 (Public Choice Award). Judges include prominent artists and education experts, including Davis Guggenheim, Nina Paley, James Franco, and many others. The competition website is whyopenedmatters.org and features an introductory video by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. All entries must be shared under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan underlined various benefits of OER. Duncan, in a video that appears on the Why Open Education Matters contest website, said, “Open Educational Resources can not only accelerate and enrich learning; they can also substantially reduce costs for schools, families and students.”
Catherine Casserly, CEO of Creative Commons, pointed out the importance of raising awareness for Open Educational Resources. “Both Creative Commons and Open Educational Resources are 10 years old this year, and there’s been an amazing explosion in the amount and quality of free, openly-licensed educational content being shared online. Now is the time to push awareness of OER into the mainstream.”
The launch of the Why Open Education Matters Video Competition coincides with the first annual Open Education Week (openeducationweek.org), which runs from March 5-10, 2012. Open Education Week is a global event that seeks to raise awareness about the benefits of free and open sharing in education.
About Creative Commons
Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org) is a globally-focused nonprofit organization dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. Creative Commons provides free licenses and other legal tools to give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions and get credit for their creative work while allowing others to copy, distribute and make specific uses of it.
About U.S. Department of Education
The U.S. Department of Education (http://ed.gov) coordinates most federal assistance on education. It works with state and local partners to promote excellence and equity for students at all levels of education to ensure that our citizens are college and career ready and can compete in a global economy.
About Open Society Institute
The Open Society Institute (http://soros.org) works to build vibrant and tolerant democracies whose governments are accountable to their citizens and, through its Information Program, works to increase public access to knowledge, including increasing access to open, high quality, educational materials.
Contacts
Timothy Vollmer
Creative Commons
tvol@creativecommons.org
Jane Glickman
Department of Education
(202) 401-1307
Darius Cuplinskas
Open Society Institute
Darius.Cuplinskas@osf-london.org
Announcing new CC Board Member Brian Fitzgerald
Creative Commons is delighted to announce the appointment of Prof. Brian Fitzgerald as a new Director of the corporation and member of the Board.
Brian Fitzgerald by Joi Ito / CC BY
Many of you may be familiar with Brian, who has been the legal lead of CC Australia since 2004 and has made an outstanding contribution to the CC and broader open access communities. The adoption of CC licenses by the Australian government, in which he was critically involved, continues to be a leading example of CC implementation, particularly as data management becomes a more and more prominent issue in open access debates.
Brian is Professor of Intellectual Property and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia. He holds postgraduate qualifications in law from Oxford University and Harvard University and is acknowledged as a leading scholar in the areas of Intellectual Property and Internet Law. From 1998-2002 he was Head of the School of Law and Justice at Southern Cross University in New South Wales, Australia and from January 2002 – January 2007 was appointed as Head of the School of Law at QUT in Brisbane, Australia. Brian is currently a specialist Research Professor at QUT and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation.
Brian’s appointment is a product of the first Affiliate Recommendation Process for Board Candidates, which petitioned members of its Affiliate network to recommend new members of the Board of Directors. Having supervised law students from over 30 different countries in his role as director of the Intellectual Property and Technology Law Clinic at Queensland University of Technology and beyond, Brian brings to the Board not only his own formidable expertise but also that of a significant international network.
Brian was formally elected to the Board on Friday, September 16, and his appointment was announced publicly at the Creative Commons Global Summit.
We thank the Affiliates and especially the nominees for their willingness to undertake the recommendation process and to contribute even further to the future of Creative Commons.
No Comments »Nature Publishing Group expands support for Creative Commons
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and Creative Commons are pleased to announce an ongoing agreement to support the work of Creative Commons (CC). NPG today pledges an annual donation to CC. This will be equivalent to $20 for every article processing charge (APC) paid for publication in any of the 20 journals owned by NPG with an open access option, up to a maximum of $100,000 a year.
“It’s imperative that those who contribute true value in the communication of the results of research have their rights protected while promoting access as far as possible,” says Philip Campbell, Editor-in-Chief of Nature and Nature Publishing Group. “Creative Commons is a key contributor to that ethos, and I am delighted that we at Nature Publishing Group will be adding our support in this way.”
This builds on the announcement last week that NPG will make a donation to CC of $20 per APC for articles published in Scientific Reports, its newest open access publication. NPG has kick-started its wider support with a donation of $15,560 to CC’s current funding drive. This is equivalent to $20 per APC for all 778 open access papers published by NPG, from when it started offering open access publishing options to its authors in 2005, to the end of 2010.
“NPG is taking this step as part of our ongoing commitment to open access,” says Jason Wilde, Business Development Director at NPG. “We feel that it is important to support the legal framework behind open access, particularly given that we and many other publishers rely on the work of CC to license open access content.”
As of January 2011, NPG publishes 45 journals that have an open access option, or are entirely open access. Twenty are wholly owned by the publisher, and it is these journals that the CC agreement will apply to. For each APC paid on these journals, NPG will donate $20 to CC. NPG is currently in discussion with its academic and society partners, and with their agreement expects to expand the program to society-owned journals in the coming months.
“NPG’s commitment to making knowledge available to share and build upon is commendable all on its own – I’m thrilled that the company is taking the innovative next step of financially supporting Creative Commons’ work. CC’s tools make sharing easy and legal, and NPG’s support for what we do demonstrates that it is deeply dedicated to realizing the potential of open access.” commented Cathy Casserly, CEO, Creative Commons.
Authors of the research paper concerned will be eligible for complimentary membership of the CC network. Joining CC gives authors access to a network of other individuals who share a belief in the power of open systems to enhance innovation. Creating profiles on the CC network allows authors to expose their work to an international community of open access supporters and leading thinkers. To claim their membership, authors simply need to contact CC with the DOI of their article. This membership offer is retrospective, and open to all authors of every open access article published in NPG journals from 2005 to the end of 2010.
NPG now offers an open access option on 51% of its portfolio of 88 journals. In addition, NPG encourages self-archiving, in line with its license to publish, and offers a free manuscript deposition service to PubMed Central and UK PubMed Central on 43 titles.
About Nature Publishing Group (NPG):
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is a publisher of high impact scientific and medical information in print and online. NPG publishes journals, online databases and services across the life, physical, chemical and applied sciences and clinical medicine.
Focusing on the needs of scientists, Nature (founded in 1869) is the leading weekly, international scientific journal. In addition, for this audience, NPG publishes a range of Nature research journals and Nature Reviews journals, plus a range of prestigious academic journals including society-owned publications. Online, nature.com provides over 5 million visitors per month with access to NPG publications and online databases and services, including Nature News and NatureJobs plus access to Nature Network and Nature Education’s Scitable.com.
Scientific American is at the heart of NPG’s newly-formed consumer media division, meeting the needs of the general public. Founded in 1845, Scientific American is the oldest continuously published magazine in the US and the leading authoritative publication for science in the general media. Together with scientificamerican.com and 16 local language editions around the world it reaches over 3 million consumers and scientists. Other titles include Scientific American Mind and Spektrum der Wissenschaft in Germany.
Throughout all its businesses NPG is dedicated to serving the scientific and medical communities and the wider scientifically interested general public. Part of Macmillan Publishers Limited, NPG is a global company with principal offices in London, New York and Tokyo, and offices in cities worldwide including Boston, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Delhi, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Madrid, Barcelona, Munich, Heidelberg, Basingstoke, Melbourne, Paris, San Francisco, Seoul and Washington DC. For more information, please go to www.nature.com.
About Creative Commons (CC):
Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain. Through its free copyright licenses, Creative Commons offers authors, artists, scientists, and educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to enable a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by the generous support of organizations including the Center for the Public Domain, Omidyar Network, The Rockefeller Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as well as members of the public. For more information about Creative Commons, visit http://creativecommons.org.
Creative Commons launches Public Domain Mark; Europeana and Cultural Heritage Institutions lead early adoption
San Francisco, California, USA; The Hague, Netherlands — 11 October 2010
Today, Creative Commons announces the release of the Public Domain Mark, a tool that enables works free of known copyright restrictions to be labeled in a way that clearly communicates that status to the public, and allows the works to be easily discovered over the Internet. The Public Domain Mark effectively increases the value of the public domain by making works that are already free of copyright readily accessible to the public. The Mark makes it clear to teachers and students, artists and scientists, that they are free to re-use material. Its release benefits everyone who wishes to build upon the rich and vast resources that are part of the shared public domain.
Europeana – Europe’s digital library, museum and archive – is the first major adopter of the Public Domain Mark. The tool will become the standard mark for works free of known copyright that are shared via the Europeana portal, playing an important infrastructural role in the EU’s efforts to ensure that all works shared online are marked with rights information. Europeana, whose partners include the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Germany’s Bundesarchiv (Federal archives), estimates that the millions of out-of-copyright works made accessible via its searchable database will be labelled with the Public Domain Mark by mid-2011. Europeana will announce the adoption of the Public Domain Mark at the upcoming Europeana Open Culture 2010 Conference, to be held 14-15 October in Amsterdam.
“The Public Domain Mark is a further step on the path towards making the promise of a digital public domain a reality,” said Michael Carroll, a founding board member of Creative Commons and a law professor at American University. “Marking and tagging works with information about their copyright status is essential. Computers must be able to parse the public domain status of works to communicate its usefulness to the public. The metadata standard underpinning the Public Domain Mark and all of CC’s licensing and legal tools are what makes this possible.”
“An important part of our mandate is to ensure that digitized works made available through Europeana are properly labelled with rights information, including when a work is free of known copyright restrictions so that teachers, students and others can freely use it in their work, changing it and remixing it as they wish,” noted Jill Cousins, Executive Director of Europeana. “The legal and technical rigour applied by Creative Commons throughout the development process makes the Public Domain Mark the natural choice for Europeana’s infrastructure. We have also worked with Creative Commons and our content providers to develop a Usage Guide for public domain works to help users of cultural content use it responsibly – by crediting the provider, among other things.”
The Public Domain Mark in its current form is intended for use with works that are free of known copyright around the world, primarily old works that are beyond the reach of copyright in all jurisdictions. Creative Commons is mapping the next phases of its public domain work, which will look at ways to identify and mark works that are in the public domain in a limited number of countries.
Creative Commons worked closely with Europeana and several of its members throughout the development of the Public Domain Mark. That process also included a public consultation period and review by CC’s worldwide affiliate network comprised of legal experts from more than 70 jurisdictions. The Public Domain Mark, to be used for marking works already free of copyright, complements Creative Commons’ CC0 public domain dedication, which provides an easy and reliable way for adding new works to the public domain prior to the expiry of copyright.
More information about the Public Domain Mark can be found on the Creative Commons website.
About Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain. Through its free copyright licenses, Creative Commons offers authors, artists, scientists, and educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to enable a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. Creative Commons’ public domain tools enhance the public domain by allowing cultural and other works that are free of known copyright to be easily discoverable over the Internet, and works to be dedicated to the public domain by their owners. Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by the generous support of organizations including the Center for the Public Domain, Google, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, Omidyar Network, Red Hat, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as well as members of the public. For more information about supporting Creative Commons contact development@creativecommons.org.
Contact
Diane Peters
General Counsel, Creative Commons
diane@creativecommons.org
+1 415 369 8480
About Europeana
Europeana is a partnership of European cultural heritage associations that have joined forces to bring together the digitised content of Europe’s galleries, libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual collections. Currently Europeana’s interface is in 26 European languages and gives integrated access to 12 million books, films, paintings, museum objects and archival documents from some 1500 content providers. Europeana is funded mainly by the European Commission, and the content is drawn from every European member state.
The great majority of material digitised by Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage institutions is out-of-copyright. To clarify the legal issues around digitisation and contractual arrangements, Europeana released the Public Domain Charter. The Charter also reminds content providers and users that the great majority of our shared cultural heritage is out-of-copyright and can be freely re-used. It is a shared resource that society uses to generate ideas, develop knowledge and inspire creativity.
Contact
Jonathan Purday
Senior Communications Advisor, Europeana
jonathan.purday@bl.uk
Phone +31 70 314 0684
Mobile +44 7885 516234
Press Kit
http://creativecommons.org/about/press/
CC Vietnam Launches at Open CourseWare Consortium Global Meeting in Hanoi
Hanoi, Vietnam – May 7, 2010
Today marks the celebration of the localized Creative Commons licenses in Vietnam, the fifty-third jurisdiction worldwide to adapt the Creative Commons licensing suite to national law. The Vietnam Education Foundation together with D&N International and Creative Commons have overseen the localization of the licenses in consultation with the Vietnamese public and key stakeholders in the jurisdiction.
The launch will take place at the Creative Commons workshop on May 7 at 1:00pm during the Open CourseWare Consortium’s (OCWC) fifth annual conference in Melia Hotel. The three-day OCWC event brings together educators, administrators, policy makers, and other interested participants to examine the capacity of Open CourseWare to effect large-scale educational improvement worldwide. Many Open CourseWare and Open Educational Resources (OER) use Creative Commons licenses to grant copyright permission to easily access, adapt, and discover the materials.
“At a time when Vietnam Is taking great efforts to improve education and strengthen its creative industries, I see the Creative Commons launch providing a firm foundation on which to build Vietnam’s education and creative sector in the digital age,” says Dr. Lynne McNamara, Executive Director of the Vietnam Education Foundation. “We greatly appreciate the support of the OCWC as well for making this event possible.”
“CC Vietnam led a masterful consultation with the Vietnamese public and incorporated that feedback into the licenses. The team continues to connect diverse expertise and passions for the betterment of the local community. Creative Commons looks forward to the many promising developments in this dynamic and dedicated region,” notes Diane Peters, General Counsel of Creative Commons.
The next phase of CC Vietnam will focus on building multi-stakeholder groups to promote legal sharing in a variety of fields, such as photography, education, and music. Institutions and individuals in Vietnam are welcome to contribute to developing a roadmap for the national project and to join the launch’s proceedings on May 7.
About the Vietnam Education Foundation
The Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF) is an independent federal agency created by the U.S. Congress in December 2000 and funded annually by the U.S. Government. Its mission is to strengthen the U.S.-Vietnam bilateral relationship through educational exchanges in science and technology. For more information: http://www.vef.gov/
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About D&N International
Established in 1992, D&N International is a leading private law firm in Vietnam providing a wide range of intellectual property services to local and foreign clients. Through nearly two decades together with its client support, D&N International has matured from a partnership of only two patent and trademark attorneys to a premier law firm with nation-wide presence and a representative office in France. Its business philosophy is to maintain the highest professional standards whilst providing clients with practical advice that adds value to their business. For more information: http://dnlaw.com.vn/.
About Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain. Through its free copyright licenses, Creative Commons offers authors, artists, scientists, and educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to enable a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by the generous support of organizations including the Center for the Public Domain, Google, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, Omidyar Network, Red Hat, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as well as members of the public. For more information about supporting Creative Commons, please contact development@creativecommons.org.
Contact
Diane Peters
General Counsel, Creative Commons
171 Second Street, Suite 300
San Francisco, CA, USA 94105-3811
diane at creativecommons dot org
Dr. Phuong Nguyen
Country Director, Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF)
Hanoi Towers, Suite 502
49
Hai Ba Trung, Hanoi
phuongnguyen at vef dot gov
Press Kit
http://creativecommons.org/about/press/
iPhone application released for the INTO INFINITY project
Creative Commons Japan + Appliya Studio + DubLab + Creative Commons + corde Japan, US, and worldwide — November 12th, 2009
Today, Creative Commons Japan and iPhone developer Appliya Studio announced the release of a brand new iPhone application, “AudioVisual Mixer for Into Infinity”, specially developed for the launch of the Into Infinity project in Japan. Into Infinity is a collaboration between Creative Commons and non-profit web radio collective Dublab.
Into Infinity comprises a collection of ready-to-remix 12-inch circular artworks and 8-second music loops created by a vast array of artists from around the world. Contributors include world-renowned graffiti artist Kofie, 2008 Whitney Biennial alumni Lucky Dragons, Anticon collective member Odd Nosdam, and electronic musicians Flying Lotus and DNTEL (AKA Jimmy Tamborello of The Postal Service). For its expansion to Japan, the Into Infinity project has additionally collected 50 “EAR” sound loops and 50 “EYE” visual circles from Japanese sound and visual artists (list below).
Creative Commons Japan teamed with APPLIYA on “AudioVisual Mixer for Into Infinity” to celebrate the growth of this free audio visual culture and to promote a more intuitive, open, and unique remix experience around Into Infinity’s Japan launch. The application was developed by Kensuke Sembo from internationally acclaimed media art duo Exonemo and Ages5&Up, an art and design collective known for witty yet solid interaction design.
When opened, the application connects to a server where all the project’s resources are stored, automatically downloading sound loops (“EAR”) that are paired with visual circles (“EYE”). The Into Infinity logo serves as an anchor point to trigger sounds: circles are moved by dragging them with your finger and when brought into the logo’s orbit the sounds start mixing. Here, the act of remixing is enabled by a simple touch interaction with the iPhone screen, allowing literally anyone to enjoy mixing or simply listen to the soundscape.
Users can share their mix instantly by posting to Twitter or by emailing their friends. An URL pointing to the mix generated is attached to the message so others can reenact your experience. You can also set the mix as your iPhone’s ring tone after downloading the mix to your home computer.
All mixes generated by the application’s users are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, keeping in line with the project as a whole.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
iTunes AppStore information:
Title: AudioVisual Mixer for INTO INFINITY
Released: 12th November, 2009
Seller: Appliya
Copyright: dublab, Creative Commons, Creative Commons Japan
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=338225050&mt=8
About Creative Commons Japan
Creative Commons Japan (CCJP) is an independent Japanese node of the Creative Commons movement active since 2004 mainly in Tokyo area. Besides porting the CC licenses to the japanese legal framework, CCJP has since then collaboratively worked with corporate entities, educational organizations and other non-profit groups in order to propel the open contents movement in Japan by organizing symposia, workshops, and consulting. In 2008 Summer, CCJP co-hosted the iSummit 2008 in the city of Sapporo and deployed an audio-visual remix contest with online video sharing services respectively run by Sony, Yahoo!, NTT, Nifty and FlipClip. In September 2009, CCJP has released a web survey for creators to research how the introduction of fair-use in Japanese copyright law is received and reported to a related working group of the Japan Agency for Cultural Affairs that most Web-aware users are welcoming a more open culture on the Net.
http://creativecommons.jp
About APPLIYA
APPLIYA works hand-in-hand with Japanese iPhone developers to bring the best in Japanese culture, design and ingenuity to the world through the international iPhone community. APPLIYA was founded in October 2008 with financial support from Softbank Inc., the exclusive mobile provider of the iPhone in Japan.
APPLIYA’s main product, APPLIYA STUDIO is an all-new service that allows anyone to easily build applications for the global iPhone/iPod Touch market. We offer fast, inexpensive options that make it easy for you to enter one of the world’s fastest growing marketplaces: the iTunes App Store.
http://appliya-studio.com/en/
About Corde
Corde is a creative collective led by music critique and producer Masaaki Hara that has been active in various fields such as label management, event organizing, writing and editing.
As a music label, soup-disk, the precedent of Corde, produced critical works by RiowArai, Suzukiski, Cappablack, Ill Suono, Inner Science, Conflict and contributed to the advancement of Japanese break beats and electronic music. soup-disk became disques corde in 2005, and started to produce undiscovered talents worldwide along with the release of such artists as RATN (Riow Arai + Tujiko Noriko) and Karafuto (a.k.a. Fumiya Tanaka). Current collaborating labels include Alpha Pup, Plug Research and Ubiquity.
As for event organizing, Corde has realized free-form parties titled “moxa” by inviting international artists such as Pole, Jan Jelinek, Opiate, The Weather(Busdriver, Radioinactive, Daedellus), Lusine, DavidLast, Nobody, Triosk, with the collaboration of Tokyo-based record shop Onsa Records. In 2008 and 2009, Corde realized the Japan tour of LOW END THEORY, the party from Los Angeles. As a writer, Hara published “To be freed from Music – Sound Recycle of the 21st century” in November 2009.
About Dublab
dublab is a non-profit web radio collective devoted to the growth of positive music, arts and culture. We have been broadcasting independently since 1999. More than 300,000 international listeners connect to our streams & podcasts monthly. dublab’s mission is to share beautiful music via the world’s best djs. What you hear on dublab crosses genres and defies classification. Unlike traditional radio, the dublab djs have total freedom of selection. You will experience many different sounds but find they all have the same soulful root. We have extended our creative action to include art exhibits, film projects, event production and record releases. The dublab echo continues to expand across the Earth.
http://dublab.com
About Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain. Through its free copyright licenses, Creative Commons offers authors, artists, scientists, and educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to enable a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by the generous support of organizations including the Center for the Public Domain, the Omidyar Network, The Rockefeller Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as well as members of the public.
For more information about Creative Commons, visit http://creativecommons.org
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