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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Spain’s Version 3.0 goes live

Michelle Thorne, November 17th, 2008

Creative Commons Spain and Catalonia has successfully completed its versioning of the ported Creative Commons licensing suite to Version 3.0. The six standard Creative Commons licenses are now legally and linguistically adapted to Spanish law and available in Castilian, Catalan, and Basque, with a Galician translation coming soon and now Galician.

CC Spain and Catalonia is lead by Ignasi Labastida i Juan and in affiliation with the renown Universitat de Barcelona, The Spanish community continues to rank among the most frequent and permissive license users, and the country hosts numerous CC-powered projects and proponents, including the collaborative Freesound database, netAudio.es and its associated netlabels, several departments of the Catalan government, and institutions like Universitat de Girona with dedicated open resources for research and learning.

“Version 3.0 of the licenses is more robust and clarifies some aspects related to moral rights and rights collective management,” explains Ignasi Labastida i Juan. “We now have many users, but there is still a lot of work to do to explain the meaning of using a CC license in specific fields.”

Creative Commons International, a project of Creative Commons, continues to work with legal experts and professionals around the world to ensure the licenses’ global interoperability and their jurisdictional legal certainty.

Freesound.org Update: Name Change, Radio, CC Licensed PHD, and more

Cameron Parkins, September 29th, 2008

Freesound, a venerable repository of CC-licensed samples, has been up to a bevy of good work since we last checked in with them. This includes developing a beautiful successor to wav2png, changing their name to freesound.org, teaming up with Happy New Ears to develop an interactive sample machine aimed at children, and launching Freesound Radio, an “experimental web-based system around collaboration and social interaction in sample based music creations.”

What many people don’t realize about Freesound.org is that it is an initiative of the Music Technology Group at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. This means that outside of Freesound there are a collection of amazing students and professors working on understanding how music technology is changing at a rapid pace. One of these student, Jordi Janer, recentlly released his PHD singing-driven interfaces for sound synthesizers as a CC BY-NC-SA licensed PDF download.