Press Releases
2006 September
Palast Productions Announces Armed Madhouse Remix Contest
Eric Steuer, September 28th, 2006
Palast Productions Announces Armed Madhouse Remix Contest: Excerpts From Audiobook of Greg Palast’s New York Times Bestseller Offered Under Creative Commons License
New York, USA — September 28, 2006
The Palast Investigative Fund, Palast Productions, Creative Commons, Alternative Tentacles Records, and Air America Radio are proud to present the Armed Madhouse Remix Contest, taking place now at gregpalast.com/remix.
The Palast Investigative Fund is offering tracks from the audiobook of Greg Palast’s New York Times bestselling book Armed Madhouse online under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, so that remixes can easily be created for the contest.
Armed Madhouse: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Class War was written by the award-winning BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast. Guest readers on the audiobook include a wide range of celebrities including Ed Asner, Larry David, Janeane Garofalo, and Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys. Other readers include progressive political journalists, commentators, and activists like Jim Hightower, Amy Goodman, Medea Benjamin, and Randi Rhodes.
Major artists including Eminem and Moby have created songs and mixes inspired by Greg Palast’s investigations. Now the general public has a chance to use Palast’s words in their own remixes.
The winners, who will be chosen by the public and celebrity judges, will receive prizes which include exposure on Air America Radio, Simon and Schuster’s and Greg Palast’s websites, as well as featured placement on Palast Productions’ upcoming spoken word CD produced by Jello Biafra’s label, Alternative Tentacles.
Submissions will be accepted through October 30th, 2006. Winners will be announced on Friday, November 3rd 2006.
About Greg Palast
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse (Penguin 2006). When Palast, an investigator of corporate fraud and racketeering, turned his skills to journalism, he was quickly recognized as, “The most important investigative reporter of our time” [Tribune Magazine] in Britain, where his first reports appeared on BBC television and in the Guardian newspapers.
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. Creative Commons licences provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to offer a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. It is sustained by the generous support of various organizations including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Omidyar Network, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation as well as members of the public. For general information, visit http://creativecommons.org
Contact
Christy Speicher
Palast Productions
212-505-5566
Email
Eric Steuer
Creative Director, Creative Commons
Email
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Launches Free Classical Music Podcast – “The Concert” – Under a Creative Commons License
Eric Steuer, September 14th, 2006
Museum offers unreleased live performances by notable musicians and emerging young artists for free download and file sharing
BOSTON, MA, USA — September 14, 2006
Starting today, everyone who visits the website of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum will be able to download free classical music and share it with anyone, anywhere.
“The Concert,” the museum’s new classical music podcast, features unreleased live performances by master musicians and talented young artists recorded from the museum’s Sunday Concert Series, the nation’s longest-running museum music series. Today, the museum posts the first in a series of 45-minute podcasts, including music by Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and Chopin for solo piano, orchestra, string quartet, and voice. A new podcast will be posted on the 1st and 15th of every month, and users will be able to subscribe to receive free, automatic updates delivered directly to their computers or mp3 players.
With this podcast, the Gardner Museum also breaks new ground, becoming the first art museum to encourage sharing and free distribution of its online programming by using a “some rights reserved” copyright license from Creative Commons. On the website, links to the Music Sharing license encourage users to freely share the music they download in “The Concert,” making the Gardner Museum one of the few early adopters of flexible copyright in licensing classical music.
“By sharing its renowned classical music performances with all the world under a Creative Commons license, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum embraces its public, expands its reach, and steps into the future,” said Eric Saltzman, a Creative Commons founder and board member. “Creative Commons got its start across the river in Cambridge, so we’re especially pleased that the museum looked to CC to make “The Concert” series freely available online.”
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School has worked with the museum to address legal issues relating to podcasting music and using Creative Commons licenses for podcasts.
“To be able to support the artists who perform here and, at the same time, to expand the reach of classical music is very exciting,” says Gardner Museum Music Director Scott Nickrenz. “By using podcasting technology, and with the full support of the artists, we’re going to be able, for the first time, to offer free recordings of great classical music to anyone who wants to listen, wherever they want to listen.”
The podcast is a modern continuation of the museum’s long history of supporting young artists. Artists heard in this first season of “The Concert” run the gamut from young chamber musicians to established solo pianists. The artists whose performances are featured in “The Concert” include: the Borromeo String Quartet, the Claremont Trio, violinist Corey Cerovsek, the Gardner Chamber Orchestra with conductor Douglas Boyd, harpsichordist John Gibbons, violist Kim Kashkashian, Musicians from Marlboro, flutist Paula Robison, baritone Randall Scarlata, and pianists Jeremy Denk, Paavali Jumppanen, Cecile Licad, and Seymour Lipkin. Artist and composer bios are available on the website.
“This is a great opportunity, not just for the musicians involved, but for listeners, too,” says pianist Jeremy Denk, one of the musicians heard in “The Concert” and the author of the blog Think Denk. “For such a long time, the only way to get a recording out was to go through established channels of distribution, and even then, it’s rare that a classical record is widely available. The internet has really changed that. Projects like this support new voices in classical music, and create new opportunities for audiences to hear them.”
“I don’t think Isabella Gardner could have imagined all the incredible innovations of the past century, but at its heart this podcast is a continuation of her vision for the museum, and of her spirit of adventure and creativity in supporting artists,” says Anne Hawley, Norma Jean Calderwood Director of the Gardner Museum.
The title “The Concert” is in part an homage to the Gardner Museum’s treasured Vermeer painting “The Concert,” stolen in 1990.
“THE CONCERT”: WHAT’S INSIDE
“The Concert” strives to make classical music accessible to many different kinds of listeners. Rather than re-broadcasting complete concerts, each podcast features selections from the museum’s recording archives, paired in a way that draws interesting connections between pieces and offers variety. In a single podcast, a listener may hear a Schubert song and a string quartet, or a Mozart violin sonata and a concerto. Brief introductions place the music in context for listeners. Those interested in additional information about composers or artists featured in the podcast can find bios and links on the podcast website.
The podcast is also a first step towards building a free online classical music library on the museum’s website. Each musical work featured in “The Concert” will be archived to this virtual library, sorted by performer and composer. As it grows, the library will be a resource for free classical music that can be shared with listeners around the world.
BREAKING NEW GROUND WITH CREATIVE COMMONS
All podcasts in “The Concert” are offered under a Music Sharing license from Creative Commons, meaning that users are free “to download, copy, file-share, trade, distribute, and publicly perform (e.g. webcast)” the podcast for any noncommercial purpose. The Gardner Museum’s choice to allow free sharing is a first for an art museum.
“As soon as I heard that this was an option, I knew it was the right thing for us to do,” says Scott Nickrenz. “If we’re serious about getting this music out there, we need to allow people to spread the word. Whether that means using peer-to-peer file sharing or burning a CD and sending it to your grandparents, we want people to be able to share this music in a way that works for them, using the power of the internet to spread classical music.”
The Clinical Program in Cyberlaw at Harvard’s Berkman Center (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/clinical) provided support and legal counsel for the project. “This has been an exciting collaboration for us,” explains John Palfrey, Executive Director of the Berkman Center and Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. “We’re big believers in combining the innovative use of technology with the freedoms offered by a Creative Commons license to help increase everyone’s access to information, knowledge and music, like these terrific Gardner concert recordings.”
MUSIC AT THE GARDNER MUSEUM
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is home to the oldest museum music program in the country. From September through May, the museum hosts weekly Sunday concerts. The Sunday Concert Series features renowned musicians, and the Young Artists Showcase presents outstanding emerging artists. Composer Portraits features adventurous young performers playing the music of 20th- and 21st-century composers. Live performances from the Gardner Museum are heard frequently on radio, locally on WGBH radio and nationally on National Public Radio’s “Performance Today.”
Isabella Stewart Gardner established a legacy of music with the creation of her museum. Boston Symphony Orchestra members performed on opening night, January 1st, 1903. Isabella Stewart Gardner also supported established and emerging young musicians, including Margaret Ruthven Lang, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s first female member. The music program at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was formally established 79 years ago.
About the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is a work of art itself. Housed in a Venetian-inspired palace, turned inside-out and surrounding an ever-changing courtyard garden, the museum’s collection spans more than 30 centuries and features artworks by Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Degas and Sargent. Continuing the legacy of its founder, changing contemporary and historic exhibitions, the oldest museum music program in the country, seasonal courtyard garden displays, annual free days, visiting contemporary artists and innovative school and community partnerships enrich the permanent collection and provide ongoing inspiration for all.
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. Creative Commons licences provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to offer a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. It is sustained by the generous support of various organizations including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Omidyar Network, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation as well as members of the public. For general information, visit http://creativecommons.org
Contact
Charlotte Landrum
Podcast Project Manager & Marketing Associate, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Phone: 617.278.5106
Email
Eric Steuer
Creative Director, Creative Commons
Phone: 415.946.3039
Email
Creative Commons Sponsored Software ccHost Releases Version 3.0
Jon Phillips, September 8th, 2006
San Francisco, USA – September 8, 2006
Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that provides flexible
copyright licenses for authors and artists along with the Creative
Commons Developer Community released the ccHost 3.0 today. ccHost is an
Open Source web-based media sharing software. This major feature release
comes on the heals of winning the Linux Journal Linux World Expo Award
for “Best Open Source Solution” and combines approximately five months of
development, usage, and testing into packages that anyone may download,
install, and use to empower on-line media sharing communities. This
release builds upon ccHost’s novel support of collaboration, sharing,
and storage of multi-media using the different Creative Commons licenses
and metadata.
These features most notably show up and are tested in Creative Commons’
project, ccMixter (www.ccmixter.org), a popular on-line social network
service that supports legal music sharing and remixing. ccHost is the
Open Source Software engine powering ccmixter.org and which anyone may
download, install, and use to freely build media sharing communities.
Ryan Lerch, a developer from the project Open Clip Art Library
(www.openclipart.org) says, “the new release of ccHost now includes
features that we have wanted for some time. It now integrates powerful
features that will enhance both the usability and efficiency of the Open
Clip Art Library and will help us immensely in our goal of creating
a comprehensive library of public domain clip art.” The Open Clip Art
Library is but one of several projects moving their projects to use the
solid infrastructure ccHost provides.
Major features in this release include native forums, infrastructure to
support multiple languages, and an e-mail notification system. ccHost
has replaced its dependency on phpbb2 with native fully-functioning
hierarchical forums. They are totally integrated with user profiles and
administrators may specifically control them.
ccHost now supports multiple languages. There is new integration of
the standard Open Source GNU gettext-based multi-language support
tools. This allows for initial support for Italian, German, Mainland
Chinese, Taiwanese Chinese, and Brazilian Portuguese in addition to
English. The project encourages others to get involved in order to
translate ccHost into more local languages.
A user-requested feature now implemented is e-mail notifications. It
allows registered users to get e-mail whey they have been reviewed,
rated, remixed, or when someone else has uploaded a file and they want
to be alerted.
Other important features include recent reviews for the sidebars, the
‘How I Did It’ browser sorting, and tons of statistics. Stats include
number of reviews for uploads, an overview of forum messages, and times
remixed, all to help a community know about itself. ccHost also supports
XSPF 1.0 playlists as feeds, basic support for the new getid3 SVG module,
and dumping of content from ccHost to a large feed file format (useful
for search engines and external parsing).
ccHost makes the lives of administrators much easier by adding an
FTP-less file manager, a Bayesian rating scheme, sub-navigation tabs,
spam flood protection, and setting of file-permissions. External to
the core ccHost application are also several command line scripts
which admins can use to powerfully help them in their maintenance
of an installation. Of particular note is the inclusion of code from
Brazil-based Bruno Dilly’s Google Summer of Code project into a tool
called “publishcchost” which allows one to publish a file to any ccHost
installation from the command line.
This release also focuses on addressing compatibility with modern ways
software is installed on the web. ccHost 3.0 fully supports PHP 5 and
has been tested thoroughly in shared hosting setups on Dreamhost and
Freedesktop.org. Also, one outstanding bug has been squashed in that
ccHost does not require getid3 for installation.
The ccHost development community encourages new developers to
contribute to the project. The future of ccHost is bright with upcoming
development focusing on user and admin requests for features like further
generalization of media support, better tools to support social networking
features, and further language support.
Chat with other developers on channel #cc on
irc.freenode.org, join the project mailing list
(https://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/cctools-cchost), and
edit the project wiki page to help shape this project’s future direction
(http://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/ccHost).
Project Website
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/ccHost
ccHost Download
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?
group_id=80503&package_id=156675
Feature Requests
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=80503&atid=559969
Bug Reports
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=559966&group_id=80503&func=browse
Roadmap (Project Timeline)
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcHost_Roadmap
About ccHost
The goal of this project is to spread media content that is licensed
under Creative Commons throughout the web in much the same way that
weblogs spread CC licensed text. ccHost is web-based infrastructure that
may be used to host and allow for commenting, remixing, and distribution
globally. The more installations of ccHost and its variations, the more
content there will be available for enjoyment and artistic re-use in a
sane and legal setting. ccHost is what is used for the infamous Creative
Commons ccMixter project, which supports legal media sharing and remixing.
About Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that promotes the creative
re-use of intellectual and artistic works – whether owned or in the
public domain. Creative Commons licenses provide a flexible range of
protections and freedoms that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept
of traditional copyright to offer a voluntary “some rights reserved”
approach. Creative Commons is sustained by the generous support of various
foundations including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation,
the Omidyar Network Fund, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Rockefeller
Foundation, as well as members of the public.
For general information, visit http://creativecommons.org/.
Contact
Jon Phillips Developer, ccHost jon@creativecommons.org
Press Kit
http://creativecommons.org/presskit
No Comments »DROPPING KNOWLEDGE USES CREATIVE COMMONS IN ITS KNOWLEDGE-SHARING INITIATIVE
Mia Garlick, September 8th, 2006
San Francisco, USA, Berlin, Germany, September 8, 2006
Creative Commons is pleased to announce that dropping knowledge, the not-for-profit initiative that offers a global knowledge portal and dialogue forum on its website will use Creative Commons’ licenses for its innovative online resource.
On September 9, 2006, 112 creative thinkers, ranging from artists, writers and scientists to philosophers, politicians and activists, will gather in Berlin, Germany, around the world’s biggest round-table — “The Table of Free Voices” — to simultaneously answer 100 of the most pressing questions that have been raised by people from around the world. Their digitally recorded answers will provide the foundation of a new web platform designed to promote dialogue and social change.
In order to make the resulting audiovisual footage in its online resource free to share for everyone, dropping knowledge decided to publish the 11,200 answers under Creative Commons licenses. Users of the dropping knowledge web platform will be able to freely access, share and remix the recorded answers from participants as diverse as filmmaker Wim Wenders, Chinese human rights activist Harry Wu and the Greek evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris as well as many more inspiring thinkers.
Creative Commons’ licenses offer a way to legally share and remix content and, consequently, are a logical solution for and enabler of dropping knowledge’s philosophy that sharing knowledge is key to a global dialogue.
dropping knowledge’s freely accessible web-platform invites the global public to ask and answer questions, exchange viewpoints and ideas and join in conversation of global social topics. It aims to become a knowledge-resource for individuals, schools, universities, NGOs and the media, as well as socially minded businesses, foundations and organizations the world over.
About dropping knowledge
A non-profit initative with offices in Berlin and San Francisco, dropping knowledge operates as an international non-governmental organization with 100% stakeholder perspective. A public resource, it cannot be owned and is freely accessible to all for all time. dropping knowledge’s Founding Partner is the Allianz Group. Its Founding Supporters are the Mark & Sharon Bloome Fund and the Wallace Global Fund.
For general information, visit the dropping knowledge 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. Creative Commons licences provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to offer a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. It is sustained by the generous support of various organizations including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Omidyar Network, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation as well as members of the public.
For general information, visit the group’s website.
Contact
Christiane Henckel von Donnersmarck
Executive Director, Creative Commons International, Creative Commons
Email
