Creative Commons Unique Search Tool Now Integrated into Firefox 1.0

Glenn Otis Brown, November 22nd, 2004

CREATIVE COMMONS’ ONE-OF-A-KIND SEARCH ENGINE DEBUTS, HERALDING NEXT-GENERATION WEB SEARCH FEATURES

EXTRA: The new Mozilla Firefox 1.0 browser ships with the Silicon Valley nonprofit’s new search technology, allowing users to comb the web for royalty-free content.

SAN FRANCISCO, USA November 22, 2004 Creative Commons today unveiled an updated beta version of its search engine, which scours the web for text, images, audio, and video free to re-use on certain terms a search refinement offered by no other company or organization today.

Creative Commons’ announcement coincides with the Mozilla Foundation’s release of its industry-leading browser, Firefox 1.0, which now features the Creative Commons search technology in its toolbar alongside such leading search services as Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, and Dictionary.com.

“The Creative Commons search engine helps companies, educators, and artists find content they can re-use without having to call a lawyer, and it offers authors and artists who want to share their work a competitive advantage toward having their work discovered online,” said Neeru Paharia, assistant director of Creative Commons and the search engine’s product manager.

For example, a documentary filmmaker could use the Creative Commons engine to search for “images of the Eiffel Tower free for noncommercial use,” and incorporate any or all of the many photographs indexed. A DJ seeking songs free to remix or mash-up could browse listings of MP3s by their legal terms. An entrepreneur seeking illustrations for her slideshow presentation could reduce costs and liability by using a Creative Commons image-specific search. An educator building course materials could include texts and videos found by the engine.

What distinguishes the Creative Commons engine from other search services is that all of the above are possible without the hassle of rights-clearance, licensing requests, or royalty payments.

At the core of the Creative Commons search engine are two key innovations, one legal and one technological. First, Creative Commons offers authors and artists a simple, standardized way to mark their work as free to share or transform, on certain conditions. By applying a Creative Commons copyright license and (cc) notice to her work, an author invites the world to make certain uses of it without giving up her copyright. Rather than the traditional “all rights reserved,” a Creative Commons license declares “some rights reserved.”

Second, and complimentary to this free legal tool, is Creative Commons machine-readable translation of the copyright licenses. When an author affixes the (cc) copyright notice to her webpage or MP3 or image file, it is automatically marked with Creative Commons “metadata” as well. It is this metadata — akin to a library catalog card describing a particular book — that the Creative Commons search engine then reads, processes, and presents to users as it crawls the web for their search requests.

The search engine was developed with the help of Nutch.org, an open-source search developer. See .

Creative Commons metadata is based on a language known as Resource Description Framework (RDF) using Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) as an interchange syntax, designed and standardized by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Web standards-setting body.

The beta search engine indexes just under one million web pages, but Creative Commons expects it will soon index the full five million pages known to carry Creative Commons licenses today.

“Creative Commons will keeping working with Nutch.org and other metadata initiatives to index more document types and offer domain-specific and reuse-specific searches,” said Mike Linksvayer, Chief Technical Officer of Creative Commons. “For example, to find music with a certain tempo or works that incorporate a specific piece of film footage.”

Creative Commons Copyright Tools Now Available in France

Glenn Otis Brown, November 22nd, 2004

CREATIVE COMMONS COPYRIGHT TOOLS NOW AVAILABLE IN FRANCE

The Silicon Valley nonprofit releases French versions of its innovative copyright licenses at the National Assembly in Paris.

San Francisco, USA and Paris, FRANCE, Nov. 22, 2004 — Creative Commons, a non-profit organization that offers free, flexible copyright tools to the general public, today unveiled a localized version of its innovative licensing system in France. The Creative Commons licenses afford authors and publishers an intermediate degree of protection over their photos, music, text, films, and educational materials under a “some rights reserved” copyright, in contrast to the traditional “all rights reserved.”

With the announcement, Creative Commons now offers free legal tools in a total of eleven country-specific versions. The organization already provides copyright licenses specific to Austrian, Brazilian, Dutch, Finnish, German, Japanese, U.S., Taiwanese, Canadian, and Spanish law, thanks to a global network of artists, lawyers, and technologists.

Staff at Creative Commons’s offices in San Francisco and Berlin worked with project lead Melanie Dulong de Rosnay of the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches de Science Administrative (CERSA) and the Université Panthéon Paris Assas II to adapt the standardized licenses for use under French law. Ms. Dulong de Rosnay, a researcher at CERSA, specializes in European technology and information society law.

“Our mission was to bring the great spirit of the Creative Commons licenses to France,” said Ms. Dulong de Rosnay. “In doing so, we sought to preserve the key elements of the original US licenses while paying due regard to the specifis of the French law, such as in the cases of contractual law and moral rights. A wide-ranging public discussion has enabled us to come up with some great solutions balancing legal requirements and our new approach.”

Creative Commons released the new legal tools, which are now available free of charge from the Creative Commons website, at a conference in the French National Assembly in Paris on Friday, November 19. The event featured speakers from the media, academia, and the large community of volunteers who coordinated the French legal porting process.

“The concise translation and the superb legal research at CERSA have made possible this important launch in Europe,” said Glenn Otis Brown, executive director of Creative Commons. “Many thanks to Ms. Dulong de Rosnay for her splendid work.”

The global expansion of the Creative Commons project, which is chaired by Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University Law School, is one of the main priorities of the San Francisco-based organization this year.

“After France, we look forward to adding two more big EU countries to the list of available licenses before the end of the year,” said Christiane Asschenfeldt, the International Commons Coordinator, based in Berlin. “Thanks are due to the friends of Creative Commons around the world.”

Creative Commons Poised for New Growth Phase with Key New Hires and Expansion into Science

Matt Haughey, November 10th, 2004

The Silicon Valley nonprofit takes on
new personnel as it prepares to explore a Science Commons, continue its
rapid international expansion, and build upon the precocious success of
its first two years.

SAN FRANCISCO,
USA November 10, 2004 Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to
expanding the range of creative and intellectual works free to share
and build upon, today announced the creation of two new staff positions
as the organization makes the transition from meteoric start-up to
online institution and begins applying its model to scientific research.

Silicon
Valley veteran Mark Resch joins Creative Commons as its overall Chief
Executive Officer, while entrepreneur and metadata expert John Wilbanks
joins as the Executive Director of Science Commons, a newly formed
branch of the organization.

Creative Commons’ long-time core
staff, led by Executive Director Glenn Otis Brown, Assistant Director
Neeru Paharia, and international affairs directors Christiane
Asschenfeldt and Roland Honekamp, will continue on in more specialized
versions of their roles. Under this leadership team, the number of web
pages carrying Creative Commons copyright licenses has grown from zero,
in December 2002, to around five million today. The nonprofit now
offers its free legal tools in nine different languages, with around
three dozen more translations in draft. The organization’s most recent
accomplishments include the sampling- and copying-friendly licensing of
the WIRED CD, a 16-track album featuring the
Beastie Boys, David Byrne, and other top artists, as well as the debut
of a unique semantic-web search engine, which now ships with Mozilla’s
industry-leading browser, Firefox 1.0.

“In just two years,
Brown and Paharia have led the Creative Commons team from the basement
of Stanford Law School to the cover of WIRED,”
said Lawrence Lessig, chairman of Creative Commons and professor of law
at Stanford, referring to the November issue of the magazine. “As the
new overall CEO, Resch brings a specific and
crucial skill-set to Creative Commons at this phase in its growth. The
core staff are now free to focus on their intense substantive workload,
while Resch will help the expanded organization become a broad and
stable movement.”

“Wilbanks’s addition as leader of the new
Science Commons branch also marks a very exciting new phase,” said
Lessig, “as the Creative Commons model is tested in unchartered areas
of intellectual endeavor.”

Mark Resch brings to the new CEO

position a wealth of experience developing successful start-up projects
into mature firms. He is chairman and co-founder of the interactive
system maker Onomy Labs, Inc. and was President and CEO of Commerce Net,
a nonprofit industry consortium that addressed critical enablers of
Internet commerce. At Xerox, Resch developed new Internet business
opportunities and managed http://xerox.com
worldwide. Resch was also co-founder and Vice President of Operations
at Luna Imaging Inc., which created large interactive photography
databases and was funded by the Getty Trust and Eastman Kodak.

Wilbanks
comes to Creative Commons from a Fellowship at the World Wide Web
Consortium in Semantic Web for Life Sciences. Previously, he founded
and led to acquisition Incellico, a bioinformatics company that built
semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical discovery.

Structurally,
the Creative Commons corporation will consist of three parallel
projects working in concert and overseen by Resch and chairman Lessig:

1. Creative
   Commons the existing organization that focuses on copyright and
   cultural subject matter like music, images, and educational materials;
2. International Commons the effort to adapt Creative
   Commons’ legal tools to various countries’ legal systems (over 50 and
   counting); and
3. Science Commons a project to build on Creative Commons’ work in open-access scientific publishing (like MIT’s
   Open Courseware and the Public Library of Science) and apply Creative
   Commons’ voluntary “some rights reserved” approach to patents and
   scientific data.

Functionally, both Science Commons
and Creative Commons will overlap with International Commons, and
current staffers will enjoy roles that span the various sections of the
organization.

Brown, for example, who coined the phrase
“some rights reserved” to describe Creative Commons’ middle-ground
approach to copyright, will continue to coordinate messaging strategy
and act as the organization’s main staff attorney. Paharia, who
directed the development of Creative Commons one-of-a-kind search
engine and its innovative MP3-tagging protocol, among other projects, will continue to coordinate business and technology development.

Brown, anticipating Creative Commons’ rapid growth in 2004, first proposed the creation of Resch’s CEO position over a year ago.

“Our
growth has exceeded even our most optimistic expectations,” said Brown,
“but by mid-2003 it was already clear that our extremely lean team had
created a movement that would require new skill sets at various levels
of the organization. We’ve been looking forward to focusing on our
substantive legal and cultural projects full-time, and Mark Resch’s
managerial expertise will help Creative Commons further accelerate its
sustained and stable growth.”

About Creative Commons

A
nonprofit founded in early 2002, Creative Commons promotes the creative
re-use of intellectual and artistic works—whether owned or in the
public domain—by empowering authors and audiences. It is sustained by
the generous support of the Center for the Public Domain, the John D.
and Catherine T. Mac Arthur Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and the Hewlett Foundation.

For general information, visit <http://creativecommons.org>.

About Mark Resch, the new CEO of Creative Commons

Mark
Resch is deeply interested in the mutual interaction of society,
business, and technology. He is Chairman and co-founder of interactive
system maker Onomy Labs, Inc. Resch was President and CEO of Commerce Net,
a nonprofit industry consortium that addressed critical enablers of
Internet commerce. At Xerox Corporation, Resch was developed new
Internet business opportunities and managed http://xerox.com

worldwide. Resch was co-founder and Vice President of Operations at
Luna Imaging Inc., creator of large interactive photography databases,
funded by the Getty Trust and Eastman Kodak. As Vice President and
Director of Computer Imaging at CRSS Architects, Inc. Resch integrated CAD,
GIS, FM, and Visualization software to render data and space. As
Director of Graphic Arts at Computer Curriculum Corporation, Resch
supported the creation of more than 3,000 hours of interactive
courseware for students at risk. Resch was assistant professor of
Computer Art in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and drafted its MFA
degree. Resch served as co-chair for the Association for Computer
Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphic and Interactive
Techniques (SIGGRAPH) in 1993, and has served on numerous non-profit
boards.

Resch is originally from Chicago, Illinois, and holds a BA in History from Grinnell College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

About John Wilbanks, Executive Director of the Science Commons

John
Wilbanks comes to Creative Commons from a Fellowship at the World Wide
Web Consortium in Semantic Web for Life Sciences. Previously, he
founded and led to acquisition Incellico, a bioinformatics company that
built semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical discovery.
Before founding Incellico, John was the first Assistant Director at the
Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and also
spent time in Washington, DC, USA as a
legislative aide to U.S. Representative Fortney (“Pete”) Stark.
Wilbanks holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Tulane University.

Contact

Glenn Otis Brown (San Francisco)

Executive Director, Creative Commons
415.946.3065
glenn@creativecommons.org

Press Kit
http://creativecommons.org/presskit/