Al Jazeera Blogs Go CC

Fred Benenson, October 19th, 2009

Al Jazeera has just launched the latest of its online project called Al Jazeera Blogs.

The website features blog posts written by prominent journalists and correspondents from the global Al Jazeera television network. It also hosts several sub-blogs sections divided by geographical areas, such as the Africa, Asia, Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. In addition, Al Jazeera has a blog focused on international business and the ongoing financial crisis.

The project also features interesting tech extras such as integration with OpenCalais’ semantic tagging system.

Credit once again goes to Al Jazeera English’s Head of Online, Mohamed Nanabhay. Mohamed also happens to be the author of the first commoner letter for this year’s annual campaign, and was one of the key players who made Al Jazeera’s amazing CC repository a reality.

Commoner Letter #1: Mohamed Nanabhay of Al Jazeera

Allison Domicone, October 7th, 2009

I’m happy to announce the launch of this year’s Commoner Letter series – a series of letters written by prominent members of the CC community in support of our annual fundraising campaign. We want to be very clear that this campaign is about much more than raising money for CC. At the heart of it all is the crucial effort to build awareness for CC and spread the word about the importance of online sharing and participatory culture as far and wide as we possibly can.

For that reason, I am proud to say that the first Commoner Letter comes to you from Mohamed Nanabhay, the Head of Online, Al Jazeera English. Mohamed and Al Jazeera have done incredible work this year helping to build the commons and spread CC’s mission on an international level. As many of you know, earlier this year Al Jazeera launched a Creative Commons repository, which houses raw footage available for anyone to share, repurpose, and remix. We’re honored to have such a fervent supporter in Al Jazeera, and I hope you enjoy reading Mohamed’s personal story of why he values Creative Commons.

If you’re interested in receiving the remaining five Commoner Letters directly to your inbox, I encourage you to subscribe today.

Photo of Mohamed Nanabhay by oso / CC BY-NC

Dear Creative Commoner,

This has been a big year for the Al Jazeera Network and our use of Creative Commons. In January we launched the world’s first repository of broadcast quality video footage released under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution (CC BY) license. At the time we made select Al Jazeera video footage – initially, footage of the War on Gaza – available for free to be downloaded, shared, remixed, subtitled and eventually rebroadcast by users and TV stations across the world, under the condition that they attribute the material to us.

A large part of embracing free culture is accepting the fact that you are forsaking control in exchange for something greater – the empowerment of the creative community. This means that you never quite know where things will lead. When launching our repository, we had thought that it would be a key resource for anyone producing content on the war and that it would primarily be used by other news organisations and documentary filmmakers.

What we saw was both surprising and delightful. Soon after posting our first video, Wikipedia editors had extracted images to enhance the encyclopedia entries on the War on Gaza. Soon thereafter educators, filmmakers, videogame developers, aid agencies and music video producers all used and built upon our footage. We were encouraged by the warm reception with which our content was received by the free culture community.

Joichi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons said at the launch, “Video news footage is an essential part of modern journalism. Providing material under a Creative Commons license to allow commercial and amateur use is an enormous contribution to the global dialog around important events. Al Jazeera has set the example and the standard that we hope others will follow”.

Being part of a community goes beyond the launch of a single project – it involves long term commitment and shared values. Our association with Creative Commons goes back to 2007 when Lawrence Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons, delivered a keynote address at our 3rd Al Jazeera Forum in Doha, Qatar, where he challenged us to make our content freely available in order to further the values of free speech. This was a challenge that we took seriously – in addition to our Creative Commons Repository, we also make a large part of our output freely available on our YouTube channel.

After the launch of our Repository we co-hosted a workshop with Creative Commons on “Building Successful Media Projects in Open Networks,” which was moderated by Creative Common’s CEO Joichi Ito. This workshop was broadcast live throughout the Middle East as part of our 4th Al Jazeera Forum held in March 2009, which was an international gathering of nearly 200 journalists, analysts, academics, and intellectuals.

While having successfully reached out to new audiences through Creative Commons licensing, the real endorsement of what we achieved was in this note by Lawrence Lessig:

“Al Jazeera is teaching an important lesson about how free speech gets built and supported. By providing a free resource for the world, the network is encouraging wider debate, and a richer understanding”.

Working with Creative Commons has been an enriching experience. We are thankful for all the help, advice and assistance that we received along the way from Lawrence Lessig, Joi Ito, and the rest of the wonderful team that works to spread free culture.

The unintended collaboration that arose as a result of our video repository, and its positive reception worldwide, would not have been possible without the help of Creative Commons licensing. We support this effort because we have witnessed, and continue to witness, the benefits of contributing to and strengthening the digital commons. In whatever capacity you are able, I hope you will also support CC by contributing to this organization and by adding to the commons. I urge you to go forth and license!

Sincerely,

Mohamed Nanabhay
Head of Online, Al Jazeera English

First Creative Commons Arab world meeting held in Qatar at Al Jazeera media forum

Donatella Della Ratta, April 12th, 2009

The first Creative Commons regional meeting in the Arab World was held a few weeks ago during Al Jazeera’s annual Media Forum in Doha, Qatar (14-16 March, 2009).

The Forum hosted the first ever face-to-face meeting of the Arab Project Leads (Ziad Maraqa and Rami Olwan from CC Jordan and Nafaa Laribi from CC Tunisia) with CC staff (Joi Ito, Donatella Della Ratta, Catharina Maracke, and Michelle Thorne), key media researchers, bloggers, CC enthusiasts and supporters from the region. The meeting, organized with the kind support of Al Jazeera, tackled many issues that are crucial for future developments of CC communities in the Arab World. Lawyers Stephanie Raye Safi from Khasawneh & Associates (Dubai), Samer Jamous from Talal Abu Ghazaleh (Qatar) and Mohammad El Said (Al Jazeera) gave input on the first ported Arabic license, now being finalized by CC Jordan.

The Arabic translation of the name “Creative Commons” took center stage of the discussion. Pros and cons were weighed whether to leave the name in English and transliterate into Arabic script, or if it should be translated with a proper Arabic word. The Jordanian translation “masha3″ was agreed to be the closest to the original English meaning, but for those who would still like to share their input, the public discussion is still open on the CC Jordan page, where you are encouraged to contribute. Other legal issues were debated, such as moral rights and fair use.

The discussion also focused on how to enrich community participation in the Arab World and develop initiatives in media, education, and general outreach. Everyone agreed that a key component for CC in the Arab World should be to foster content creation in Arabic and to encourage innovation in tools and software to speed up this process. With these plans and more underway, a community list will be started in English and Arabic. If you’d like to be in touch, please let us know!

The CC Al Jazeera day also featured a panel on “Building successful media projects in open networks”, moderated by CC’s CEO Joi Ito. Mohamed Nanahbay, former Head of New Media at Al Jazeera, presented the CC Al Jazeera repository, a website initiated by the channel to host broadcast quality footage, all distributed under CC BY. Mohamed explained how the footage has been used and remixed by different groups of people, including several TV channels that edited and re-broadcasted the material. Footage shot in Gaza last December is now available in the repository, and Al Jazeera announced in Doha that they plan to add more topics and genres before the summer. The panel also hosted a delegation of the European Broadcasting Union led by Nicoletta Iacobacci, Head of New Interactive, to learn more about how to use CC licenses in future broadcasting initiatives.

It was a very busy and interesting day, with plenty of insights and thoughts for the future development of open content and CC communities in the Arab world. A big thank to the Al Jazeera team, particularly Mohamed, Moeed, and the New Media team for their passionate support and the great work to make this happen. Shukran gezilan!

We hope to plan more events of those kind, and if you want to stay in touch with us on those topics, please write an email to donatella@creativecommons.org

Updates from CC in the Arab World

Michelle Thorne, February 4th, 2009

More than a year ago, Free Culture advocate Anas Tawileh analyzed the state of Arabic content online. His portal Arab Commons has grown modestly but steadily since its launch in 2007, offering 11 full textbooks in Arabic, plus magazines, podcasts, poetry collections, and a number of art works — all within a few months. For a language with 200 million speakers, however, Anas and his colleagues in the Arab World were determined to match scale and build a larger pool of open Arabic content. But how?

A critical first step came when CC Jordan announced the public discussion of the first Version 3.0 draft in Arabic, a necessary move to improve the licenses’ legal certainty in court and prompt wider adoption in the Middle East.

Now, with the unparalleled release of Al Jazeera’s Gaza footage under CC BY, the Arab World is poised for more. In Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah already created the Initiative for Arabic Digital Content, which recently held a two-day workshop on “Open Arabic Content” in Riyadh. CC legal expert Rami Olwan from Jordan was in attendance, discussing the licensing system and meeting supporters. Ziad Maraqa, co-Project Lead from CC Jordan, spoke yesterday in Damascus at the iCommunity FOSS Workshop, a notable gathering for the Syrian Free Software community.

With initiatives like these, Creative Commons in the Arab World will no doubt continue to grow. After the Jordan CC licenses launch, other jurisdictions are ready to follow. There is still a lot of translation and outreach work to be done, so if you would like to get involved, you can contact Donatella Della Ratta, our Arab World Media and Development Manager, and learn more.

With that, a huge thank you to the recent event organizers for inviting CC to participate, and thank you to the many individuals already helping promote Free Culture in the Arab World!

Happy birthday Wikipedia!

Mike Linksvayer, January 15th, 2009

Wikipedia began 8 years ago today and now exists in 265(!) languages with over 10 million articles among them. In those 8 years Wikipedia has grown from an outlandish dream and into a reality far more outlandish than the original dream — it now seems silly to compare Wikipedia to past encyclopedias, for while Wikipedia and sibling sites run by the Wikimedia Foundation are encylopedic in nature, they are 1,000 times more useful than anything previously conceived as an encyclopedia. Happy birthday and congratulations!

Almost exactly 1 year and 11 months after the birth of Wikipedia, Creative Commons launched. As many know, a process is underway that may result in Wikipedia migrating to CC BY-SA as its main license, which would be a great thing for the growth of free culture. However, see Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ letter in support of CC’s recently ended annual fundraising campaign for other connections. And day to day, media under appropriate CC licenses is being utilized by Wikipedians — who for example immediately began using video and stills from the Al Jazeera CC repository launched just two days ago.

Here’s to many more years of free culture!

For context, we celebrated Mozilla’s 10th birthday last April and the GNU project’s 25th last September. It’s very difficult to draw comparisons, but the longevity of the free software movement and the relatively recent massive success of Wikipedia should inspire and humble the rest of the free culture and related movements.

Al Jazeera Launches Creative Commons Repository

Fred Benenson, January 13th, 2009

Al Jazeera is releasing 12 broadcast quality videos today shot in Gaza under Creative Commons’ least restrictive Attribution license. Each professionally recorded video has a detailed information page and is hosted on blip.tv allowing for easy downloads of the original files and integration into Miro. The value of this footage is best described by an International Herald Tribune/New York Times article describing the release:

In a conflict where the Western news media have been largely prevented from reporting from Gaza because of restrictions imposed by the Israeli military, Al Jazeera has had a distinct advantage. It was already there.

More importantly, the permissive CC-BY license means that the footage can be used by anyone including, rival broadcasters, documentary makers, and bloggers, so long as Al Jazeera is credited.

There’s more information over at Al Jazeera’s CC repository, and in our press release. You can also add the Al Jazeera repository to your Miro feeds by clicking here.