Argentina Flag / quimpg / CC BY

It’s taken us a few months, but we would like to introduce some new members of the CC family – our new CC Argentina affiliate team.

The new Argentinian team (see their website here and their CC wikipage here), came on board late last year and is headed up by public leads Beatriz Busaniche and Patricio Lorente out of institutional partners Wikimedia Argentina and Fundación Vía Libre. Both organisations are well known in the Latin American open community. Wikimedia Argentina supports the local Wikimedia community and promotes projects for the dissemination of free content and wiki-culture. Meanwhile, the non-profit Fundación Vía Libre works closely with the free software community and is committed to spreading knowledge and sustainable development. Among other things, it is a participant in both the FLOSSWorld and Science, Education and Learning in Freedom (SELF) projects.

With the new team, comes some exciting events for CC in the region. On 8 March CC Argentina, with Wikimedia Argentina and La Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, will jointly host a breakfast with Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, an academic from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and legal lead of CC France. The theme of the event will be “legal aspects of the digital public domain.” Melanie and Beatriz will then team up with Claudio Ruiz of CC Chile at the first Latin American GLAM-Wiki event in Santiago a week later.

This comes hot on the heels of the announcement a few weeks ago of a new CC-licensed Argentinian documentary, Runa Kuti: Indigenas Urbanos, which is making the rounds of film festivals. The film, which is under a BY-NC-ND license, focuses on the lives of indigenous Argentinians living in Buenos Aires.

Congratulations and welcome to the new team. We look forward to working with you on CC and all things open in Argentina.

by Antje Taiga Jandrig / CC BY-NC-SA

When Vincent Moon and Efterklang completed “An Island” earlier this year, they launched public-private screenings of the film, encouraging the public to host free screenings under the CC BY-NC-SA license. Over the next two months, 1,200 screenings took place at various locations around the world; this Google map and Flickr stream demonstrate the reach and scope of the film.

To follow the success of their initial distribution, Vincent Moon and Efterklang have announced a limited edition DVD package of “An Island” and a digital download that follows the Pay What You Can model used successfully in the past by bands such as Radiohead. You can pay what you can for the documentary and download it under CC BY-NC-SA at the website, where you can also order one of the limited edition DVD packages with a run of 5,000.

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!

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!

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.

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.”