Press Releases

2007 January

CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSES LAUNCH IN INDIA

Mia Garlick, January 26th, 2007

Silicon-Valley-based NGO now offers licenses in 35 jurisdictions around the world

San Francisco, CA, USA and Berlin, Germany — January 26, 2006 — Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to building a body of creative work free to share and build upon, today unveiled a localized version of its innovative licensing system in India.

Creative Commons copyright licenses are available free of charge from the group’s website. The licenses allow authors and artists to mark their works as free to copy or transform under certain conditions—to declare “some rights reserved,” in contrast to the traditional “all rights reserved”—thereby enabling others to access a growing pool of raw materials without legal friction.

With Creative Commons India joining the effort, Creative Commons is proud to announce that its licenses now are offered in localized versions in a total of 35 jurisdictions around the world.

Staff at Creative Commons’ offices in San Francisco and Berlin worked with project leads Lawrence Liang from the Alternative Law Forum (ALF) in Bangalore and Shishir K.Jha from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) to adapt the standardized copyright licenses to Indian law.

Today the Indian versions of the Creative Commons licenses will be launched in the IIT Bombay’s auditorium in Mumbai, at a ceremony held as part of the ‘IIT Techfest’, IIT Bombay’s Annual International Science and Technology festival. The Techfest with its lectures, workshops and exhibitions offers students a platform to explore the realms of science and technology in the 21st Century.

At the launch Joichi Ito, Chairman of Creative Commons, will give the keynote address. Speakers Nandu Pradhan, President and Managing Director of Red Hat India, film director Anurag Kashyap, Professor Deepak Phatak of IIT Bombay, project lead Lawrence Liang as well as Catharina Maracke, Creative Commons International Coordinator, will speak about topics related to culture, law and technology.

Says Project Lead Shishir Jha, “Creative Commons India will seek to inspire everyone to share the subcontinent’s abundant wealth of visions and ideas by standing tall on the shoulders of her intellectual and creative giants.”

About IIT Bombay

IIT Bombay, set up by an Act of Parliament, was established in 1958, at Powai, a northern suburb of Mumbai. Today the Institute is recognised as one of the centers of academic excellence in the country. The institute has 12 departments of engineering, basic sciences and the humanities, 11 research centers, 3 postgraduate degree schools and 5 interdisciplinary programs. IIT Bombay is largely a residential institution with over 4 thousand students and over 400 faculty. It offers undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral degrees. Over the years, there has been dynamic progress at IIT Bombay in all academic and research activities, and a parallel improvement in facilities and infrastructure, to keep it on par with the best institutions in the world.

For more information, visit the IIT Bombay 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 Creative Commons’ website.

Contact

Catharina Maracke
International Coordinator
Creative Commons International, Creative Commons
Email
+49.30.280.93.909

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VIEUX FARKA TOURÉ REMIX CONTEST LAUNCHES TODAY AT CCMIXTER

Eric Steuer, January 24th, 2007

VIEUX FARKA TOURÉ REMIX CONTEST LAUNCHES TODAY AT CCMIXTER

Winning Remix To Be Featured On Upcoming “Vieux Remixed” CD

January 24, 2007

Creative Commons, Modiba Productions and Global Beat Fusion are pleased to announce that the Vieux Farka Touré / “Ana” Remix Contest is now taking place now at ccMixter. Visit the contest at http://www.ccmixter.org/vieux.

Modiba Productions artist Vieux Farka Touré — a highly talented guitarist, singer, songwriter, and percussionist from Mali — is offering the audio source files from the song “Ana” online under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, so that producers worldwide can use the sounds in remixes and new compositions. The general public is invited to download these tracks and create their own versions, appropriate elements in new compositions, and generally use the elements for any noncommercial creative expression.

Eric Herman and Jesse Brenner of Modiba Productions and Derek Beres of Global Beat Fusion will be selecting the best remix. The winning remix will be included on Modiba Productions’ “Vieux Remixed” CD compilation.

To enter, download the separated audio elements of Vieux Farka Touré’s “Ana” and upload a remix to ccMixter between February 7, 2007 and March 7, 2007. All entries must be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 license. Under this license, the public may legally make copies of, distribute, and create derivative works from the remixes – as long as the original authors are credited and the uses are not for commercial purposes.

Quotes about the Vieux Farka Touré / “Ana” Remix Contest:

Jesse Brenner, Modiba Productions:

“One of Modiba’s central goals as an organization is collaboration, the expansion of boundaries to bring in new ideas and approaches through working together in an open and dynamic way. The Creative Commons project is a perfect example of this, and we look forward to bringing more talented and inspired minds to further explore the sounds of Vieux Farka Touré.”

Derek Beres, Global Beat Fusion:

“Taking Vieux’s incredible acoustic material and adding a digital edge is what the future of global music is about. We’ve been remixing cultures as long as cultures have formed, explored and, inevitably, met one another. Our modern technological capabilities are giving us the opportunity to get to know one another socially, spiritually and sonically. This project will be yet another meeting ground, this time the gorgeous blues of Mali and the rest of the creative world.”

About Vieux Farka Touré

Vieux Farka Touré is the son of the late international superstar and two-time Grammy Award-winner Ali Farka Touré. An historic passing of the torch from father to son is represented by Vieux’s debut. He has crafted a global-minded style all his own with original compositions displaying flourishes of rock and reggae amidst Saharan Blues and traditional Malian melodies. Vieux Farka Touré is ushering in the next generation of Mali blues on his self-titled debut album, which features Ali himself on two remarkable pieces. These tracks are the only existing recordings of father and son playing together, and are amongst the final recorded material of Ali before his death. The album also features two magnificent guest performances by the Grammy Award-winning kora master Toumani Diabaté.

About Modiba Productions

Modiba is a music production company and record label committed to the social and economic empowerment of Africa and its Diaspora. They are the creators of ASAP: the Afrobeat Sudan Aid Project, which has raised over $135,000 for the refugees of the crisis in Darfur, Sudan.

About Global Beat Fusion

Global Beat Fusion is Derek Beres, one of the leading figures in international music in America, working in numerous facets of the industry, from journalist and DJ to producer and presenter. He has written for dozens of magazines covering the traditional and digital realms of global music and has toured internationally, playing alongside some of the most important figures in the scene today. Well versed in international music, he is equally adamant about world cultures, devoting his life to the path of yoga, Eastern philosophies and world mythology.

About Creative Commons

Contact

Eric Steuer
Creative Director, Creative Commons
Email

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KEY CORPORATE CONTRIBUTIONS HELP CREATIVE COMMONS BEAT ITS FUNDRAISING GOAL 1.6x OVER.

Melissa Reeder, January 8th, 2007

San Francisco, USA — January 7, 2007

Creative Commons today announced that generous support from a variety of key technology companies — including Microsoft, Mozilla, Digital Garage, Yahoo!, Macrovision, Red Hat, DivX, Tucows and Second Life — pushed Creative Commons’ fundraising campaign to an extraordinary success. In combination with the proceeds from the Wired Benefit Concert, other significant corporate contributions from Google and Sun announced earlier in the campaign, and contributions from Ariel Capital Management, Brave New Films, Current TV, and Wiki-How, these new contributions combined to push the total amount raised to close to $500,000 — more than 1.6x the original target of $300,000.

Notably, the largest corporate contributions have come from Mozilla and Microsoft.

Microsoft’s contribution is the corporation’s second to Creative Commons and follows the release in June 2006 of the Microsoft Office CC licensing plug in, which allows people to easily apply a Creative Commons license to their Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Mostly recently, it joined with Google and Yahoo! to release a joint sitemap protocol under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license.

“Creative Commons aims to advance innovative thinking about copyright in our information-based society,” said Tom Rubin, Associate General Counsel of Microsoft. “By providing new ideas that leverage the flexibility of copyright, Creative Commons has pioneered solutions that benefit both creators and the public. Microsoft is pleased to support programs that strive to respect intellectual property rights while benefiting creators, consumers and society at large.”

Mozilla has been a long time supporter of Creative Commons. A Creative Commons search option in the pull-down search menu within all versions of Mozilla Firefox has enabled more than 80 million people to easily locate intellectual property available under a Creative Commons license.

“Creative Commons has provided a trusted framework for the exchange and flow of information assets online,” said Christopher Beard, vice president of marketing and product management at Mozilla. “We’re extremely pleased to continue our support of a fellow public benefit organization that has established itself as a leader in shaping the future of the Internet.”

Yahoo! and Red Hat were also second time contributors, while Digital Garage, Macrovision, Second Life, DivX and Tucows contributed to the San Francisco based non-profit for the first time. Many of these companies have also made important technical contributions to Creative Commons as well. Yahoo, for example, has developed a search portal that filters results on Creative Commons licenses. And since its launch, Second Life and Creative Commons have worked together to assure that the rights to content created in Second Life remain with the author – not the company. Second Life has also become an important forum for debates surrounding Creative Commons and the global digital commons. Most recently it was the platform used for Lawrence Lessig to publicly announce his retirement as Creative Commons Chairman — passing a virtual torch to CC’s new chairman, the Japanese venture capitalist, Joi Ito.

“Our community of authors, scientists, creators and educators has made Creative Commons the success it has become,” CEO Lawrence Lessig commented. “But it is an extraordinary reward to see that success recognized by some of the most important Internet technology companies. We, like they, build infrastructure for the digital age. They make moving bits easier; we make moving the rights associated with those bits easier as well.”

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

Corporate Contacts:

Microsoft
Jason Matusow
jasonma@microsoft.com

Mozilla
Alex Guerra
Senior Account Executive
aguerra@ar-edelman.com

Digital Garage
Yoshito Funabashi
pr@garage.co.jp

Yahoo
Kiersten Hollars
Corporate Communications
Kiersten@yahoo-inc.com

Macrovision
Julia Hughes
Public relations
jhughes@macrovision.com

Red Hat, Inc.
Kerri Catallozzi
Corporate COmmunications Coordinator
kcatallo@redhat.com

DivX
Tom Huntington
thuntington@divxcorp.com

Tucows
Leona Hobbs
Communication Manager
lhobbs@tucows.com

Second Life
Cory Ondrejka
CTO Linden Lab
cory@secondlife.com

Wired
Perri Dorset
Executive Director, Communications
Perri_dorset@condenast.com

Google, INC.
Megan Quinn
meganq@google.com