CC10 – dublab’s Creative Commons 10th Birthday Video Mix from dublab on Vimeo.

Ten years ago today, the first Creative Commons licenses were released. Over the past ten days, the CC community has celebrated around the world with concerts, discussions, hackathons, and parties. People in the community have put together mixtapes, created iPhone apps, and blogged about why CC is important to them. And then this happened.

We’ve seen three major announcements: Hatsune Miku becoming CC licensed, a huge grant for open education for adult English language learners, and Wikimedia Commons reaching 15 million files.

We’ve had friends of CC blog about their favorite CC-licensed works: Cory Doctorow on one of his biggest influences, John Wilbanks on an important public domain dataset from an unlikely source, Jason Sigal on a musician who built a career on open licenses, and Gautam John on a CC-licensed children’s book that took on a life of its own.

Today, we talk with Jonathan Worth about the future of open education, and Claudio from Bad Panda Records shares his favorite CC-licensed songs. And we leave you with a pocket guide for the road, courtesy of CC Colombia.

The past ten days have been a testament to the depth and diversity of the Creative Commons community. CC’s greatest strengths are the depth and diversity of material in the commons, and the multitude of the commoners themselves. If you get excited about what this community can do together, then consider making a donation to CC today.

Thanks.

It’s getting hard to keep up with all of the CC10 commotion. Today, the CC community is celebrating in Muscat, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Seoul.

Not to be outdone by the #cc10 Europe mixtape, Creative Commons Korea has created a #cc10 iPhone app featuring ten musicians who license their work under CC. Bad Panda Records has put together a #cc10 mix of its own, and dublab made a video mixtape. Meanwhile, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory had a gathering in honor of CC, meaning there have now been CC10 celebrations on every continent in the world.

And here on the blog, we’re celebrating the diverse group of artists and creators who use Creative Commons licensing. Behance founder and CEO Scott Belsky explains why artists don’t need to be afraid of open licensing. And we welcome one of the newest members of the family of CC-licensed works, virtual pop star Hatsune Miku. Finally, we highlight Open Attribute, a browser plug-in that makes attribution easy.

Wow. There are not one, but four five CC10 mixes of Creative Commons–licensed music!

• Dublab #cc10 mix (for the San Francisco party)
• pEtEr Withoutfield – Creative Commons Mixtape (for the Berlin party)
• #cc10 Europe mixtape
• #cc10 mix by Jamendo staff
• #cc10 mix by Bad Panda Records

That’s enough CC music to get you well into the weekend. Meanwhile, the German CC community is celebrating in Munich, and here on the blog, we’re celebrating the do-it-yourself spirit of the CC community.

CC Portugal’s Teresa Nobre explains the #cc10 Europe project and gives a little glimpse into the life of a CC European affiliate. And Jamendo’s Pierre Gérard talks about the history of Jamendo and encourages musicians to let their music be free.

Finally, we’re featuring The School of Open, CC’s new collaboration with P2PU, where anyone can create new courses. This year, The School of Open has grown from a simple idea into a vital resource for the open community.

Edited Dec 14 to add Bad Panda’s #cc10 mix to the list.

On day 7 of our CC10 celebrations we have an exciting announcement: the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) has announced a 3.5 million dollar grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for a new program to help adult English language learners improve their language skills — Integrated Digital English Acceleration (I-DEA). Importantly, all online learning modules developed for I-DEA will be made available under a Creative Commons Attribution license — the most liberal of our licences, allowing all teachers around the country and the world to reuse, remix and reinterpret them.

In honor of this announcement, we focus on education for today’s CC10 featured platform and resource. We take a look at Open content licensing for educators, one of the many courses provided by Wikieducator, a community-developed resource of free elearning content – created by the public, for the public. The Open content licensing for educators course, an initiative of the OER Foundation, has been running all this week, training educators both how to make full use of the wealth of educational resources now available for free download under CC and other open licenses, and how to share their own materials with others.

We also celebrate a milestone by another great community-created platform, as Wikicommons hits 15 million files, just in time for CC10. Wikicommons is one of the world’s oldest and largest resources of CC licensing and public domain media, from photos to videos to sound files. It’s the source of all the media you find on Wikipedia, and its files are used extensively by cultural and educational institutions to share and create open education resources. Check out our post on this great achievement to see two videos by our friends at WikiAfrica, explaining how and why a cultural institution might want to share their resources on Wikicommons.

Finally – everyone should take a moment to appreciate the fabulous CC10 poster above by @saidRmdhani. It was produced by attendees to our Arab World Regional Meeting, which has been running all this week in Cairo, and finishes up today. Congratulations to all the attendees, and we can’t wait to hear more about your workshops.

Today, an exciting announcement. In honor of CC’s tenth birthday, our friends at Free Music Archive are launching a competition to find a new birthday song – one that can be shared and sung without paying a cent. Read about the contest and start working on your entry.

Keeping on the music theme, guest blogger Jason Sigal tells the story of Chris Zabriskie, a musician who opened a lot of professional doors when he decided to start licensing his music CC BY. And we highlight a Guide to Creative Commons produced by CASH Music, a nonprofit that builds open source tools to empower artists and their fans find a more viable and sustainable future for music.

Today’s also a big day for CC10 events, with 5 separate events on 3 continents – two US parties from CC friends Redhat (in Raleigh) and the Auraria Library (in Denver); talks and debates in London and Warsaw; and a classic CC Salon in Qatar with a special guest, CC’s CEO Cathy Casserly.

Welcome to day 5 of CC10! Today, CC communities are celebrating in Stockholm and Haifa. And here on the Creative Commons blog, we’re discussing governmental and institutional adoption of CC licenses and public domain tools.

CC’s Timothy Vollmer acknowledges several achievements around the world in governmental CC adoption, and we revisit one of the biggest announcements of the year, Europeana’s decision to release its record data under the CC0 public domain waiver. Finally, browse the Open Data Handbook, the definitive legal and technological guide to open data from our friends at the Open Knowledge Foundation.

We’re also excited to unveil a new CC music mix that Dublab has put together in honor of CC10. Listen to the mix while you browse photos from the worldwide celebrations.

On day 3 of our CC10 celebrations we focus on film.

David Evan Harris tells us about Global Lives, a collective of filmmakers worldwide building an open source video library of human experience.

We talk to Blake Whitman, VP of Creative Development at one of the world’s largest video sharing platforms, Vimeo, about why Creative Commons is an essential tool for creation in the digital age.

Finally, we delve into Blendernation, the free open source 3D animation community built around the Blender platform, with Renderfarm.fi‘s Big Buck Bunny Loves CC.

Welcome to Day 3 of #cc10. Today, Commoners are celebrating in Mexico City and Jakarta, and here on the Creative Commons blog, we’re celebrating Creative Commons in science.

In his guest blog post, John Wilbanks applauds sharing where you might not expect it, explaining how the world’s largest pharmaceutical company used open data sharing to make a huge step in malaria research.

Today’s featured platform is the Public Library of Science (PLOS). PLOS CEO Peter Jerram explains how open licensing is key to the sharing and development of scientific knowledge.

Finally, a trip to the origins of CC and an amazing example of the possibilities of international sharing: it’s the Kazakh translation of Larry Lessig’s Free Culture.

On day 2 of CC10 we focus on what makes CC more than just a bunch of licenses – our community.

We give a long over-due introduction to Creative Commons for those who haven’t met us yet, with a favorite resource from one of our global volunteer affiliates: CC Qatar presents Meet Creative Commons. At the same time, we discuss CC’s geek-cred with Josh Wattles, adviser to one of our oldest artist communities – deviantART – and we examine how a simple licensing decision can create community around a work, with Gautam John of Pratham Books.

Most importantly, today we get our CC10 community parties started. Not 1, not 2, but 3 separate birthday events are happening around the world tonight. CC Berlin brings us keynotes, talks, interviews and a DJ, in a party themed around the success and impact CC has built over the past 10 years. Meanwhile CC Belgium is rebooting itself with a showcase of Creative Commons artists and projects. And finally, CC Headquarters has its own party in San Francisco, where CC staff, Board and community members will participate in interactive exhibits, live remixing (brought to you by Global Lives and Dublab) and general good-cheer. We’ll have a tweet wall at the event – so if you want to be part of it, just tweet us your birthday wishes after 5pm San Francisco time tonight.

Welcome to the very first day of Creative Commons’ 10th birthday celebrations!

Over the next 10 days we will be celebrating CC’s first decade with activities, events, tweets and competitions. As well as dozens of real world parties, we’ve set up a dedicated CC10 website as a hub for all things birthday. Each day on this site we will be showcasing highlights from the CC community – some of our favorite users, platforms and resources. Like an advent calendar, these featured items will be ‘revealed’ as each day of the CC10 website goes live, along with the events for that day and following days, and other exciting announcements and materials. You’ll be able to navigate backwards to previous days using the dates at the top of the page.

We kick off our CC showcase today looking at the world of CC and text, with a blog post from one of CC’s longest running and most vocal supporters – Cory Doctorow. Cory introduces us to one of his favorite CC-licensed works, Rudy Rucker’s Wetware books, which he calls “the finest high-weirdness of the golden age of cyberpunk.” We also bring you an interview with Taylor Pipes of Scribd, a digital document sharing platform with more than 25 million texts, an amazing 80% of which are CC-licensed. And finally, we give you all (or at least those of you who speak Swedish) a primer on the CC licenses, what they mean and which is best for you, with CC Sweden‘s Välj rätt licens! poster.