Creative Commons Expands Documentation Project

Timothy Vollmer, March 23rd, 2008

San Francisco, CA, USA — March 24, 2008

Creative Commons today announced the expansion of a documentation project to explain various facets of Creative Commons licensing. The initiative includes links and PDF downloads to information on critical CC specifications, recommendations, research studies and tutorials. Some of the topics covered include the CC+ and CC0 projects, a simple licensing how-to, and best practices for integrating Creative Commons licensing in websites. The documentation project also offers posters, flyers and other creative media such as the “Sharing Creative Works” comic book. These documents may be downloaded directly from the Creative Commons Documentation page (http://creativecommons.org/projects/documentation) and are suitable for high quality printing and display.

Alex Roberts, Senior Designer at Creative Commons, explained the benefits of the documentation initiative. “We’re always trying to make Creative Commons licenses easier to understand and use. From the beginning, CC has championed human-readable copyright licenses. Our documentation project works to extend this practice by offering short guides and explanations to a variety of CC topics.” All of the documentation is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license for redistribution, reuse and remix.

In addition to the documents created by staff, Creative Commons called upon the larger community to help build a rich documentation portfolio. Jon Phillips, Community & Business Development Manager at Creative Commons, said that user participation is crucial in the documentation process. “There are so many interesting projects using Creative Commons licenses. We need to be able to draw upon these innovative organizations and talented individuals to help define and share their best practices. We’ve provided the framework and source files for many of our documents to get this process rolling.” Creative Commons also asked for help from the broad community of CC adopters and open content supporters to help translate the PDF documents into other languages.

Visit http://creativecommons.org/projects/documentation to learn more about the project and get involved.

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.

Contact
Jon Phillips
Business + Community Development Manager
jon@creativecommons.org
+86 1-360-282-8624
Creative Commons
http://creativecommons.org

Press Kit
http://creativecommons.org/presskit

Creative Commons LiveContent 2.0 Demonstrates Autocuration of Open Content

Timothy Vollmer, March 9th, 2008

San Francisco, CA — March 10, 2008

Creative Commons today announced the release of LiveContent 2.0, a LiveDVD full of Creative Commons-licensed multimedia content and free and open source software. LiveContent allows users to explore open content such as music, video, photography, books, and educational materials that can be freely used, copied, and built upon. LiveContent boots directly from the LiveDVD, making it easy for users to interact with Creative Commons-licensed content and test-drive open source software. The LiveDVD is built upon Fedora 8, a Linux-based operating system, and the disc includes a number of open source software applications like OpenOffice, The Gimp, Inkscape, and Firefox.

The LiveContent project draws CC-licensed multimedia content from a variety of diverse projects aiming to share creativity and culture more openly. Included are photographs from Flickr.com and Wikimedia Commons, music from Jamendo.com and Simuze.nl, videos from Make Magazine, Boing Boing TV and others, books from Manybooks.net, and open educational resources from MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative.

For version 2.0, LiveContent transitions from a LiveCD to a LiveDVD platform, providing more space for open content and software. Beginning with the popular photo-sharing website Flickr.com, LiveContent 2.0 demonstrates a unique content “autocuration” process. This technique manipulates web services provided by Flickr and automatically compiles photos onto the LiveDVD build. With the success of the Flickr autocuration process, Creative Commons aims to push for further standardization of CC content syndication feeds and APIs.

Creative Commons calls for increased community participation in curating open content and developing technologies that spread CC-licensed content. “Creative Commons doesn’t maintain a centralized repository of the work published under the suite of CC licenses,” said Jon Phillips, Business and Community Development Manager at Creative Commons. “But our Content Directories project has been a useful tool for organizations to list their CC-powered projects. It’s important that we develop a standardized process for the community to be able to learn about and reuse open content.”

LiveContent is a product of collaboration across a number of organizations including Red Hat (http://www.redhat.com), Worldlabel.com (http://www.worldlabel.com) and various CC content providers. LiveContent 2.0 is now available for free download at http://spins.fedoraproject.org. A pre-burned disc may be purchased at http://www.on-disk.com.

For more information visit http://creativecommons.org/projects/livecontent

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.

Contact
Jon Phillips
Business + Community Development Manager
jon AT creativecommons.org
+86 1-360-282-8624
Creative Commons
www.creativecommons.org

Press Kit
http://creativecommons.org/presskit