Dutch Public Broadcaster VPRO Releases CC-licensed Documentaries

Fred Benenson, October 1st, 2009

Paul Keller, one of our project leads for CC Netherlands just let us know about an exciting development from their public broadcaster, VPRO, who on Wednesday released 2 full length (and one more coming soon) documentaries under our CC-BY-NC-SA licenses. What’s great is that these documentaries are current pieces, not old selections from the back catalog or archives – they’ve all aired within the last 10 days. Additionally, VPRO is also offering DVDs of the films for sale.

The documentaries, available in both Dutch and English are available to download in an almost-HD resolution of 640 by 380, but are also posted on mininova.org here and here.

Here’s an excerpt from the project’s press release:

According to Bregtje van der Haak, coordinator of the VPRO’s Century of the City project, releasing these documentaries under a Creative Commons license contributes to efforts to better serve the VPRO’s public:

“We are producing a lot of documentaries that are of interest to specialized communities. In the case of urbanization this includes architects, urban planners and students. From research we know that a growing segment of the VPRO’s audience is watching less and less television but continues to highly value this type of content. By offering content for download we are increasing the life cycle of these programs and enable a whole number of new forms of re-use of our productions. As a public broadcaster we have the obligation to make our productions available to the public in an as flexible manner as possible.”

Congratulations to VPRO!

Code Rush Now Available Under CC BY-NC-SA

Fred Benenson, August 5th, 2009

Waxy.org reports that Code Rush — the commercially-unavailable documentary from 2000 about the open-sourcing of the Netscape code base and the Mozilla project which gave birth to Firefox, is now available under our Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. This is a crucial part of the Internet’s history so we highly recommend you watch it and share it with your friends.

Download Code Rush here, watch the entire film annotated by Andy Baio on viddler here, or check out the official Code Rush homepage here.

Thanks to everyone who made this wonderful gift to the commons possible!

Tomorrow in SF: “RiP: A Remix Manifesto” screening + Eclectic Method dance party

Eric Steuer, July 22nd, 2009

If you’ll be in the San Francisco Bay Area tomorrow night (Thursday, July 23), please join us for a screening of RiP: A Remix Manifesto, the acclaimed new documentary about remix culture, copyright, Girl Talk, Lawrence Lessig, Gilberto Gil, Cory Doctorow, and others. The film (released under a Creative Commons BY-NC license) is being presented by the San Francisco Film Society at Mezzanine (444 Jessie St.); doors open at 7pm and the screening begins at 7:30. RiP’s director, Brett Gaylor, will be in attendance to discuss the film and take questions. Members of the CC staff will be there too – please come by and say hi.

After the screening, DJs Adrian and the Mysterious D from Bootie SF will get the second part of the night – a dance party! – started with a live set of their awesome remixes and mash-ups. They’ll be followed by the incredible VJ crew Eclectic Method, who will rock the house with a live video remix set incorporating samples from movies, television, video games, found footage, and all kinds of visual randomness.

The event is open to people 21 years of age and older. Tickets (available here) are $12 for SFFS members and $17 for non-members. More information is available on the San Francisco Film Society’s website.

UNU Media Studio Launches Our World 2.0 VideoBriefs

Jane Park, November 6th, 2008

Some of you might remember Cameron’s post back in June regarding the United Nations University (UNU) Media Studio’s decision to license their Media Studio and Online Learning sites under CC BY-NC-SA. Well one month later they launched “Our World 2.0“, the English version, also licensed under the same (with the Japanese version taking off just this past month), which is a webzine dedicated to exploring environmental issues and what can be done about them, specifically dealing with the “complex, inter-connected and pressing problems like climate change, oil depletion and food security.” Taking its name from Web 2.0, a sweeping trend in the use of the Internet for “community and social network based approaches to content development that take advantage of new technologies,” Our World 2.0’s central tenet is “that we can use our collective knowledge, technology and design to facilitate creativity, innovation, and, most notably, collaboration amongst people.”

Today, they announced the launch of their new video documentary series on the web, “short high-definition documentaries which examine key issues relating to climate change, energy, and food security, the subjects at the heart of [their] Our World 2.0 webmagazine.” The first video is titled “The Electric Sunflower” which focuses on electric vehicles—their current use and future. It’s pretty exciting stuff. The video, along with the rest of the content on their website, is open for use via CC BY-NC-SA.

The UNU Media Studio is dedicated to the sharing and creation of Open Educational Resources (OER), which they believe will ultimately improve education. They write that “[Their] main goal is to try to help academics in the developing world and [they] are fully engaged with a number of exciting innovative movements that could help better share knowledge and improve education. These include efforts to share content (opencourseware and open educational resources). This movement is supported by new approaches to copyright licensing and intellectual property rights that promote sharing and collaboration, specifically through Creative Commons.”