CC Talks With: Mr. Mayo’s Class Integrates CC, Skypes with Lawrence Lessig

Jane Park, November 19th, 2009

Photo by Mr. Mayo CC BY-NC

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to talk to George Mayo, known as Mr. Mayo to his students, a middle school Language Arts teacher in Maryland. Mr. Mayo was brought to CC Learn’s attention by Lawrence Lessig, CC’s founder and current board member, who Skyped with Mr. Mayo’s class for thirty minutes, answering questions on copyright, YouTube’s take-down policy and downloading music. Mr. Mayo and his class have integrated CC licensed works into their daily activities, documenting it all at mrmayo.org. Instead of elaborating on the various innovative ways Mr. Mayo and his class uses CC, I’m going to let George speak for himself. The following is the interview I had with him via Skype. You can also listen to the audio here.

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New CC-Licensed Feature Length Films from Sweden & Italy

Cameron Parkins, October 14th, 2009

Creating a feature films is a massive undertaking, and it is for this reason that we’re always so impressed to hear of film makers using CC licenses. Two recent examples are Nasty Old People from Swedish director Hanna Sköld and Torno Subito from Italian Simone Damianiunder.

“Nasty Old People” was released under our Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license and Torno Subito is available under our Attribution-Noncommercial license. What’s great about these licenses is that they both allow and encourage legal sharing and remixing as methods for promotion and encouraging fan engagement. The results are already beginning to appear: fans of Nasty Old People have raised donations amounting to 10% of the film’s loaned budget, and they’ve also created a Portugese translation of the film’s subtitles.

Over the years, there have been a number of CC-licensed feature films released, and we do our best to keep up with them all on our film wiki page, but please add to the wiki if you come across something we’ve missed.

Film Annex Helps You Make Money on Your CC Content

Fred Benenson, October 14th, 2009

Film Annex is an online film distribution platform and and Web Television Network with million of viewers and thousands of filmmakers. Recently, the site launched CC license support (complete with ccREL expression via RDFa). This is fantastic news in and of itself, as it means there’s now more choice for creators looking for platforms that support CC licensing options. But Film Annex isn’t just another video hosting site. They’re helping filmmakers finance their productions through a unique blend of advertising and revenue sharing:

Film Annex Web TVs come with interactive players that are syndication-friendly. Web TV owners can maximize their income by syndicating their Web TV players with their content and ads (pre-rolls) on other websites. While these content providers receive 50% of the advertising revenues generated on their Web TVs, they earn another 33% upon syndication. Publishers also benefit from this revenue share as they receive 33% of the revenues upon syndication. Publishers are also given the option to become financiers or executive producers on a project if they choose to donate a percentage of their share to the content provider.

Since August 2009, twenty content providers benefited from the Film Annex Network and its ad revenue share. The amount generated on each Web TV per month has approximately been 350-1000 dollars. Film Annex’s short-term goal is to raise this number to 5000. In addition to promoting each Web TV individually, Film Annex mentions the new projects of the content providers on their respective Web TVs in order to raise awareness about them and receive audience support.

So if you’re a filmmaker looking for some return on your CC video, sign up for account and get uploading!

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!

“Here. My Explosion..”: CC-Licensed Feature-Length Film and Soundtrack

Cameron Parkins, May 18th, 2009

Here. My Explosion… is a new feature-length film from Reid Gershbein. Released under a CC BY-NC-SA license
(the film’s soundtrack is released under a CC BY-SA license), and is available for free download here.

The film is shot using a tilt-shift photography technique and clocks in at around 75 minutes. If you like the film, you can support it through donation at Gershbein’s website. Thanks to Boing Boing for the heads up.