Press Releases
Puerto Rico Launches Localized Creative Commons Licenses
San Francisco, California and San Juan, Puerto Rico — February 22, 2008
Today in San Juan, the University of Puerto Rico Cyberlaw Clinic will host the launch of localized Creative Commons licenses, marking the forty-fourth jurisdiction worldwide to port the Creative Commons licensing suite. The event will be held at 7:00pm at U.P.R.’s School of Law, featuring an exhibition by Puerto Rican artists, a promotional CD release, and keynote by Creative Commons Chairman Joichi Ito.
The Creative Commons Puerto Rico team is lead by Hiram A. Meléndez-Juarbe, Carlos González-Yanes, and Chloé Georas, who coordinated the porting process and public consultation with local and international legal experts. In preparation for the public discussion, a memorandum was prepared by the 2006-2007 class of the University of Puerto Cyberlaw Clinic to analyze the role of moral rights in Puerto Rico‘s mixed legal tradition. The memorandum is available for download: http://creativecommons.org
“The Cyberlaw Clinic’s commitment to ‘free culture’ has provided the ideal context for the development of the Creative Commons Puerto Rico (CCPR) project,” notes María L. Jiménez, Director of U.P.R.’s Legal Aid Clinic. “The university has a longstanding tradition as an innovative institution in many legal fields and is deeply committed to the advancement of important social values such as the ones embraced by the Creative Commons project.”
The CCPR Project Leads add that they are “fully aware the importance of a rich and culturally diverse public domain for a vigorous democratic society and of the many ways in which cultural growth is stifled by a combination of technology, copyright law and practice, and the entertainment industry’s hold on the creation and dissemination of cultural products.” They confirm that “CCPR understands what is at stake and is, thus, very serious about consistently following up on the essential community building and internationalizing dimension of this enterprise.”
One of the major assets to the CCPR licenses is the avoidance of unnecessary legal obstacles to creative exchanges. As Rolando Silva, photographer, graphic artist and professor, confirms, “Creative Commons licenses are a neat alternative to the categorical copyright. We were in dire need of more flexible possibilities within copyright laws that permit the dissemination of artistic work without the fear of lawsuits or any such foolishness.”
About the University of Puerto Rico School of Law
Founded in 1913, the University of Puerto Rico School of Law is the oldest of its kind in Puerto Rico. The School of Law has been accredited by the American Bar Association since 1945, has been a member of the American Association of Law Schools since 1944 and is the only public law school in Puerto Rico.
The Cyberlaw Clinic of the U.P.R. School of Law promotes principles of liberty and freedom of expression on the internet as well as the development of a technological and legal context that encourages individual and collective creativity. For more information, visit http://cyberclinicpr.org/.
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
Dr. Catharina Maracke
Director
Creative Commons International, Creative Commons
catharina [at] creativecommons [dot] org
Press Kit
http://creativecommons.org
http://creativecommons.org
Lawrence Lessig to Give Final Presentation on Free Culture and Copyright
Lawrence Lessig to Give Final Presentation on Free Culture and Copyright
San Francisco, CA, USA — January 29, 2008
Creative Commons founder and Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig will give his final presentation on free culture, copyright, and the future of ideas at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium on January 31st, 2008 at 1pm. After 10 years of enlightening and inspiring audiences around the world with multimedia presentations that inspired the Free Culture movement, Professor Lessig is moving on from the copyright debate and setting his sights on corruption in Washington.
The presentation is being recorded for the upcoming feature film Basement Tapes: The Making of a Pirate Movie, a documentary about copyright in the digital age (see http://www.opensourcecinema.org). Over four years in the making, the film is co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada and the award-winning production house EyeSteelFilm.
For more information about the event, please visit http://events.stanford.edu/events/125/12594/.
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
Brett Gaylor
Director, Open Source Cinema / Basement Tapes
brett@opensourcecinema.org
514-937-4893
Mike Linksvayer
Vice President, Creative Commons
ml@creativecommons.org
415-369-8480
Philippine Launch Celebration: a vibrant member of the global commons
San Francisco, CA, USA and Pasay City, Metro Manila, Philippines — January 14, 2008
Following the unveiling of the Philippine localized Creative Commons licenses in December, citizens of the archipelago will gather today in Manila to celebrate in full the public launch of its completed licenses and the country’s strides towards fostering the global commons movement.
Attorney Jaime N. Soriano, Creative Commons Philippines Project Lead and Executive Director of the e-Law Center, announces that the launch activities are scheduled to take place on January 14, 2008 from 1:00pm to 9:00pm at the Arellano University School of Law.
The event will consist of three parts: 1) an orientation to projects by stakeholders in the Philippine Commons, with the aim of developing a local collaboration promoting alternative licensing, free and open source software, open education, and free culture; 2) the public presentation of the CC Philippine Licensing Suite Version 3.0, which has been available online since its soft launch December 15, 2007; and 3) the CC Philippines Concert featuring more than six local rock bands.
Atty. Soriano and Atty. Michael Vernon M. Guerrero, Deputy Project Lead of CC Philippines, are both pleased to also announce the public launching of the Philippine Commons website, available at www.philippinecommons.org, and the adaption of a CC license to the LawPhil Project, the most popular and comprehensive website on Philippine law and jurisprudence.
The localized CC licenses will also be applied to the Arellano Law and Policy Review; the law school’s IT Law Journal, whose first quarter issue features all articles devoted to Creative Commons; and the original works of the Arellano Law Singers. These materials will be presented and shared at ACIA: International Workshop on Asia and Commons in the Information Age, held on January 19-20 in Taipei, Taiwan.
About Arellano University School of Law
The law school Cayetano S. Arellano, a non-stock non-profit institution, is named after the First Chief Justice of the Philippine Supreme Court and established in 1938. Today it boasts more than six decades of providing quality legal education. The foremost objective of the school is to create global lawyers: practitioners who are deeply educated in the law, practice-ready, and devoted to service not only in the local but also the international community. Arellano Law prides itself for being one of the most populous law schools in the Philippines with faculty members who have distinguished themselves in law practice, the judiciary, government service, and the academe. The law school furthermore is one of the few schools in the Philippines that produces the most number of lawyers in the annual bar examinations administered by the Supreme Court.
For more information, please visit http://www.arellanolaw.edu/.
About the e-Law Center at Arellano University School of Law
The e-Law Center was founded in November 2002 under the auspices of the Arellano University School of Law, following the launching of the school’s LAWPHiL Project, which is considered one of the most popular on-line and electronic databases of Philippine law and jurisprudence that is accessible for free to the general public. The Center is pursuing projects in research, publication, policy initiatives and advocacy, capability building, academic support, and linkages in the field of information and communication technology as it affects the Philippine legal system.
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
Dr. Catharina Maracke
Director
Creative Commons International, Creative Commons
catharina [at] creativecommons [dot] org
Press Kit
http://creativecommons.org/presskit
http://creativecommons.org/international/ph/
Creative Commons Announces Pledges Made to Fulfill “5×5” Funding Challenge
CREATIVE COMMONS ANNOUNCES PLEDGES MADE TO FULFILL “5×5” FUNDING CHALLENGE
Pledges include promises of support from the Hewlett Foundation, Omidyar Network, Google, Mozilla, Red Hat, and the Creative Commons board
San Francisco, CA, USA — January 2, 2008
Today, Creative Commons announced that pledges have been made to meet the Hewlett Foundation’s “5×5” funding challenge to Creative Commons. The 5×5 challenge, issued in honor of Creative Commons’ fifth birthday, called for the organization to find five funders to each promise five years of support at $500,000 per year.
In addition to the Hewlett Foundation, Creative Commons received pledges of $500,000 in yearly support for five years from Omidyar Network, as well as from an anonymous European trust. Google has pledged $300,000 in support renewable for five years, while Mozilla and Red Hat have each pledged to contribute $100,000 annually for five years.
The final block of support comes from the board of Creative Commons, which has promised to personally raise or contribute $500,000 to the organization annually for five years.
“I couldn’t be more pleased to make this announcement,” said Lawrence Lessig, CEO of Creative Commons. “The generous support of these foundations, companies, and individuals ensures that Creative Commons will be able to continue working to build and support a freer culture for years to come. I cannot express how fortunate we feel to have the backing of this wonderful community.”
“Omidyar Network is thrilled to support Creative Commons in its efforts to develop a copyright system that values flexibility, innovation, and protection for both content creators and users,” said Will Fitzpatrick, Corporate Counsel of Omidyar Network. “We believe that there needs to be a simple way for people to legally and freely access, share, and use information, and that Creative Commons’ efforts are crucial to reaching this goal.”
“Google is proud to support Creative Commons and its mission of offering authors, artists, scientists, and educators open and flexible ways to make their creative works widely available,” said Kent Walker, Google’s General Counsel. “At Google, we help people find, organize, and share information. Creative Commons plays an important role in facilitating the legal and creative re-use of much of this great content.”
“Mozilla is excited to support the work of Creative Commons with our 5×5 pledge,” said Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation. “Creative Commons has empowered people everywhere to help build a participatory Web by making it easy to share as well as protect one’s creative work.”
“Red Hat’s dream to act as a force for democratizing content and the mission of Creative Commons are a natural fit for each other,” said Max Spevack, Fedora Project Leader. “Red Hat hopes that this can be one of many opportunities to support Creative Commons in the coming years.”
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
Eric Steuer
Creative Director, Creative Commons
Email
Press Kit
http://creativecommons.org/presskit
No Comments »Creative Commons Launches CC0 and CC+ Programs
San Francisco — December 17, 2007
Today, Creative Commons announced the launch of CC0 (aka CC Zero) and CC+ (aka CC Plus). These programs are major additions to CC’s array of free legal tools.
CC+
CC+ is a protocol to enable a simple way for users to get rights beyond the rights granted by a CC license. For example, a Creative Commons license might offer noncommercial rights. With CC+, the license can also provide a link to enter into transactions beyond access to noncommercial rights — most obviously commercial rights, but also services of use such as warranty and ability to use without attribution, or even access to physical media.
“Imagine you have all of your photos on Flickr, offered to the world under the CC Attribution-NonCommercial license,” said Lawrence Lessig, CEO of Creative Commons. “CC+ will enable you to continue offering your work to the public for noncommercial use, but will also give you an easy way to sell commercial licensing rights to those who want to use your work for profit.”
The CC+ architecture was pioneered by early adopter CC-enabled businesses such as Magnatune.com and is effectively implemented by numerous creators and intermediaries who enable a simple way to move between the sharing and commercial economies. CC+ provides a lightweight standard around these best practices and is available for implementation immediately.
Creative Commons will collaborate with commercial rights agencies and other companies to build upon CC’s metadata architecture and give the public simple “click-through” access to commercial rights and other opportunities beyond the scope of a public CC license. Companies and organizations announcing support for CC+ include Yahoo!, Blip.tv, Beatpick, Jamendo, RightsAgent, Youlicense, Strayform, Cloakx, and Copyright Clearance Center.
“The CC+ initiative adds an exciting new dimension that enables a commercial element to co-exist within the Creative Commons framework,” said Rudy Rouhana, co-founder of RightsAgent, Inc — provider of a new service that automates licensing to permit re-use and monetization of user-generated content. “RightsAgent is delighted to be one of the first companies to implement the CC+ standard. The working relationship between RightsAgent and Creative Commons now provides both a transactional and commercial layer that will help further the success of Creative Commons and the success of this initiative,” said Rouhana.
CC0
CC0 is a protocol that enables people to either (a) ASSERT that a work has no legal restrictions attached to it, or (b) WAIVE any rights associated with a work so it has no legal restrictions attached to it, and (c) SIGN the assertion or waiver.
“In some ways, CC0 is similar to what our public domain dedication does now,” said Lessig. “But with CC0, the waiver of rights will be more robust internationally, and both the waiver and assertion will be vouched for, so that there is a platform for reputation systems to develop. People will then be able to judge the reliability of content’s copyright status based on who has done the certifying.”
CC0 was previewed at Creative Commons’ 5th birthday event this past weekend in San Francisco. A beta version of the protocol will be released for public discussion on January 15, 2008. This will include the traditional components of the CC architecture — legal code, human-readable explanation, machine-readable metadata, and tools. The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School will collaborate with Creative Commons on drafting the legal code for CC0.
In conjunction with the CC0 announcement, Creative Commons’ project Science Commons launched the “Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data” — a method for ensuring that scientific databases can be legally integrated with one another. The protocol is built on the public domain status of data in many countries (including the United States) and provides legal certainty to both data deposit and data use. Science Commons has worked with data licensing thought leaders and is pleased to announce partnerships with Jordan Hatcher and Dr. Charlotte Waelde, the legal team behind the Open Database License; Talis, the company behind the Open Database License process; and the Open Knowledge Foundation, creators of the Open Knowledge Definition.
“The ‘freedom to integrate’ is one of the fundamental freedoms for data on the Web, and in one stroke, the Science Commons protocol integrates the primary legal options around data into a single Open Access regime,” said John Wilbanks, Vice President for Science Commons. Data in the sciences is most useful when it’s in the public domain, like the human genome and all the information at the US National Center for Biotechnology Information. This protocol, and its implementation by Talis and the Open Database License, creates a legal tool for data creators to put their data into the same legal zone as the genome and other key fundamental research resources.”
“We’ve recognized the importance of Open Access data at Talis for a number of years, and it was an obvious step for us to work with Jordan Hatcher and Dr. Charlotte Waelde to validate our earlier efforts and to place them in a sound legal framework from which others could also benefit,” said Dr. Paul Miller, Talis’ Technology Evangelist. “Looking at CC0 and the Creative Commons’ Science Commons project, the synergies with our own license development were immediately apparent. We shall now be working together with Creative Commons and the license’s new hosts at the Open Knowledge Foundation to see the pool of remixable data grow, for the benefit of 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. 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
Mike Linksvayer
Vice President, Creative Commons
ml@creativecommons.org
Press Kit
http://creativecommons.org/presskit
No Comments »Serbia announces ported licenses on Creative Commons’ fifth year
December 15, 2007 — San Francisco, CA, USA and Belgrade, Serbia
The much-anticipated global celebration of Creative Commons’ fifth year is amplified today with the announcement of the locally ported Creative Commons licensing suite in Serbia. In close collaboration with slobodnakultura.org, Wikimedia Serbia, and New Media center Kuda_org, the Creative Commons Team in Serbia, lead by Nevenka Antic, has successfully adapted the Creative Commons licenses both linguistically and legally to Serbian national law.
The ported the Serbian licenses, available soon online, will be celebrated today in Belgrade at Dom omladine at 5:00pm CET. Speakers at the event include Slobodan Markovic from ICANN, Ivan Jelic & Desiree Miloshevich of the Free Software Network and the Internet Society, and Marcell Mars from CC Croatia and MAMA.
The festivities will continue at the Cultural Center Magacin, where guests will join the CC Serbia Team in greeting the globally synchronized Creative Commons Birthday Parties via webcast. The international birthday parties are being coordinated by local chapters around the world to commemorate Creative Commons’ fifth year in a series of celebrations culminating in San Francisco on December 15th from 10pm-2am PST.
The party in Belgrade will then head to Club Andergraund at 10pm CET with live acts from artists MistakeMistake, Crobot, Wolfgang S, Ah, Ahilej, and Electric Divine.
CC Serbia’s Public Project Lead Vladimir Jeric thanks the Serbian community for their support, and he expresses the team’s appreciation for the public’s input during the discussion of the Serbian licenses, which he reports “assured us that we are on the right way regarding meeting the demands from the side of both ‘content producers’ and ‘users.’”
The CC Serbia Team hopes to present the first collection of locally-licensed CC works this spring.
About Slobodnakultura.org
Slobodnakultura.org is an non-formal network based in Belgrade. Acting as a kind of meta-organization coordinating different initiatives and actions by different individuals and organizations, it presents a collaborative platform for discussing and conducting various projects. All of it’s projects are formally being conducted trough one or several of it’s member organizations with the formal status. Creativecommons.org.yu is the part of slobodnakultura.org, and it helps in building the tools requested from within the society in order to introduce different social codes. Fundraising and management for the localization of the Creative Commons licenses is being carried out by Bureau for Culture and Communication Beograd (birobeograd.info), a member of slobodnakultura.org network.
For more information, please visit: slobodnakultura.org and creativecommons.org.yu
About Wikimedia Serbia
Wikimedia Serbia, formed in 2005, is a non-profit independent organization, based in Belgrade. It is included in the international network of non-profit and independent organizations sharing the goals of free knowledge issues as well as improving and participating in the global collection of educational content under free licenses or in the public domain. Wikimedia Serbia supports free knowledge Community and free knowledge projects building the Community in Serbia and providing the projects in Serbian language. The projects are coordinated by the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit parent organization of various multilingual free content projects, such as Wikipedia, the famous online encyclopedia, and Wikimedia Commons, the repository for free video, images, music and other media.
More information: rs.vikimedija.org.
About New Media Center_kuda.org
New Media Center_kuda.org is an independent organization which brings together artists, theoreticians, media activists, researchers and the wider public in the field of Information and Communication Technologies. In this respect, kuda.org is dedicated to the research of new cultural relations, contemporary artistic practice, and social issues. Kuda.org’s work focuses on questions concerning the influence of the electronic media on society, on the creative use of new communication technologies, and on contemporary cultural and social policy. Some of the main issues include interpretation and analysis of the history and significance of the information society, the potential of information itself, and the diffusion of its influence on political, economic and cultural relationships in contemporary society. New Media Center_kuda.org opens space for both cultural dialog and alternative methods of education and research.
More information: www.kuda.org.
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 is sustained by the generous support of 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 more information about Creative Commons, please visit http://creativecommons.org.
Contact
Dr. Catharina Maracke
Director
Creative Commons International
catharina@creativecommons.org
Press Kit
http://creativecommons.org
http://creativecommons.org
Philippines introduces locally ported Creative Commons licenses
December 15, 2007 — San Francisco, CA, USA and Pasay City, Metro Manila, Philippines
Today in Pasay City, the 42nd locally ported Creative Commons licensing suite will be launched for the Philippines. The Creative Commons licenses, now legally adapted to Philippine law, enable authors, artists, scientists, and educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms in efforts to promote a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach to copyright.
The Creative Commons team members in the Philippines, lead by Atty. Jaime N. Soriano, have worked under the auspices of the e-Law Center at the Arellano University School of Law and in collaboration with Creative Commons to port the licenses to their national jurisdiction.
In a prelude to a larger celebration planned in January 2008, CC Philippines will unveil the licenses today at 2pm PST at an event held in Arellano University’s School of Law. Atty. Michael Vernon M. Guerrero, jurisdiction deputy project lead of CC Philippines, will introduce the licenses, followed by the inauguration of the Philippine Commons, a collaboration fostering alternative licensing, free and open source software, open education, and free culture in the region.
Dr. Catharina Maracke, Director of Creative Commons International, thanks the CC Philippines Team for all their efforts, and she remarks, “The licensing project in the Philippines is a strong step towards strengthening and cultivating the global commons. The Philippines joins neighboring Malaysia, launched two years ago, in offering completed localized CC licenses. With upcoming jurisdictions in Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia, this region within Asia will continue to thrive and enjoy its vibrant remix-reuse community.”
The launch event in Pasay City will continue later in the evening as a birthday party for Creative Commons, as part of a series of synchronized celebrations worldwide to commemorate Creative Commons’ fifth year.
About AUSL
The Arellano University School of Law (AUSL), a non-stock non-profit institution, is named after the First Chief Justice of the Philippine Supreme Court, Cayetano S. Arellano, and established in 1938. Today it boasts more than six decades of providing quality legal education. The foremost objective of the school is to create global lawyers: practitioners who are deeply educated in the law, practice-ready, and devoted to service not only in the local but also the international community. Arellano Law prides itself for being one of the most populous law schools in the Philippines with faculty members who have distinguished themselves in law practice, the judiciary, government service, and the academe. The law school furthermore is one of the few schools in the Philippines that produces the most number of lawyers in the annual bar examinations administered by the Supreme Court.
For more information, please visit http://www.arellanolaw.edu/.
About the e-Law Center at Arellano University School of Law
The e-Law Center was founded in November 2002 under the auspices of the Arellano University School of Law, following the launching of the school’s LAWPHiL Project, which is considered one of the most popular on-line and electronic databases of Philippine law and jurisprudence that is accessible for free to the general public. The Center is pursuing projects in research, publication, policy initiatives and advocacy, capability building, academic support, and linkages in the field of information and communication technology as it affects the Philippine legal system.
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 is sustained by the generous support of 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 more information about Creative Commons, visit http://creativecommons.org.
Contact
Dr. Catharina Maracke
Director
Creative Commons International, Creative Commons
catharina@creativecommons.org
Press Kit
http://creativecommons.org
http://creativecommons.org
Creative Commons Voluntarily Dismissed from Lawsuit
San Francisco — November 28, 2007
We are happy to announce that the plaintiffs in the Chang litigation, previously reported at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7680, have voluntarily dismissed Creative Commons from that lawsuit. Although we are confident that any court would have agreed that there was no valid legal claim against us, this is a good result. It was highly gratifying to have so many of our legal friends offer to represent us pro bono.
We thank them for supporting Creative Commons’ mission. But we prefer to devote our resources to doing the ongoing work of developing and distributing content licensing tools that are as clear and easy to use as possible.
Creative Commons CEO Lawrence Lessig makes this comment: “I applaud the decision of plaintiffs’ counsel to remove Creative Commons from this lawsuit. We work hard to make our work clear, but it is absolutely clear that there is no basis in law for the suit they filed against us.” For more, including a copy of the dismissal, see Larry’s blog entry at http://lessig.org/blog/2007/11/from_the_whyagcfromcravathisgr.html.
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 is sustained by the generous support of 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 more information about Creative Commons, visit http://creativecommons.org.
Contact
Eric Steuer
Creative Director
Creative Commons
eric@creativecommons.org
Press Kit
http://creativecommons.org/presskit
No Comments »Creative Commons Releases Add-in Support for OpenOffice.org
San Francisco, CA — November 14, 2007
Today Creative Commons released an Add-in for OpenOffice.org which allows users to select and embed a Creative Commons license in documents. Based on work completed as part of the Google Summer of Code by Cassio Melo, the add-in supports Writer (word processing documents), Calc (spreadsheets) and Impress (presentations).
Google Summer of Code provides students with funding to work on open source software between May and August. During summer 2007, Cassio worked on developing the basic OpenOffice.org add-in. Cassio was mentored by Nathan Yergler, Creative Commons CTO, and generously supported by Google’s Open Source programs. “Cassio provided a great foundation for us to build on and maintain. I’m thrilled to finally be able to offer support for OpenOffice.org,” said Yergler.
The Add-in is available without charge, and is licensed under the GNU General Public License. Download information and links to source code are available at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/OpenOfficeOrg_Addin.
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 is sustained by the generous support of 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 more information about Creative Commons, visit http://creativecommons.org.
Contact
Nathan Yergler
Chief Technology Officer
Creative Commons
nathan@creativecommons.org
Creative Commons Launches Second Annual CC Swag Photo Contest
San Francisco, CA — November 13, 2007
Today, Creative Commons launched its second annual CC Swag Photo Contest. The contest is an important component of the third annual Creative Commons fundraising campaign, which was launched on October 1.
“It is not only vital that we meet our $500,000 goal for the fundraising campaign, it’s also important to use the campaign as away to disseminate CC’s mission,” said Melissa Reeder, Creative Commons’ development coordinator. “The CC Swag Photo Contest is a great way for people to show their support for Creative Commons.”
The CC Swag photo contest challenges people to creatively photograph Creative Commons T-shirts, buttons, stickers, and other promotional items (all available at CC’s online store). To enter, the photographs must be uploaded to the Flickr group CCSwagcontest07. Please go to the official contest webpage to read the other rules and regulations and to see the 2006 contest image archive.
The two winners, chosen by Creative Commons, will be awarded 100 postcards featuring their winning photo. These postcards will also serve as promotional material for Creative Commons and will be distributed internationally to promote CC.
Franz Patzig, one of the winners of the 2006 CC Swag Photo Contest, says that in addition to being a way to support Creative Commons, the contest helped raise his profile as a photographer.
“I have been publishing all my photos under Creative Commons licenses since CC’s beginning,” Patzig says. “I joined the contest for fun; I never expected my photo to be chosen as one of the winners. Since then, many people have used it to illustrate blog postings about the commons, which has brought a lot of attention to my Flickr pages. I’ve even sold some photographs. I love sharing my work.”
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 is sustained by the generous support of 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 more information about Creative Commons, visit http://creativecommons.org.
Contact
Melissa Reeder
Development Coordinator
Creative Commons
melissa@creativecommons.org
