“Crypton’s Hatsune Miku is an amazingly unique, inspiring and successful example of how sharing pulls together in community to empowers and explosion of creativity. It’s one of my favorite projects. I’m so excited that Creative Commons can now be part of that story.”
–Joi Ito, Creative Commons board member, Director at the MIT Media Lab

Hatsune Miku / Crypton Future Media / CC BY-NC

In celebration of the tenth anniversary of Creative Commons, we are happy to announce that Hatsune Miku has joined the CC community!

Hatsune Miku is the first and most famous virtual singer. What sets Miku apart from other “characters” is the original “remix-free” license for users. Since her debut in 2007, Miku have been remixed and cherished by fans, resulting in 170,000+ videos on YouTube, 95,000 songs, and 500,000+ artworks created by the community.

Hatsune Miku also played the major role at TOYOTA USA and Google Chrome TV commercials. She has performed sold-out shows with 3D images not only in Japan, but also in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Singapore. To deal with growing demands from the world, Crypton Future Media Inc., which gave a birth to Hatsune Miku and owes her character, has decided to adopt the CC BY-NC license on December 14th.

“The creative culture using Hatsune Miku and related community will spread worldwide by applying a CC license to the illustration of Hatsune Miku. I hope that this encourages cross-border collaborations among creators and enables them to deepen their understanding of each other’s culture and respect to creators through their works and creation.”
–Hiroyuki Ito, CEO of Crypton Future Media, Inc.

OLIVE for quake survivors
OLIVE is a Wikipedia-like site that provides much-needed information for quake survivors in various languages. With thousands of people displaced from their homes in Japan, many are surviving in make-shift homes and shelters, with scant resources. OLIVE provides practical and creative ways on how to best utilize available resources, such as how to make a dish from a plastic bottle or empty can, how to preserve body heat with polystyrene or newspaper, and how to stay warm in cardboard house. You can help by contributing articles to OLIVE or translating existing articles–all of which are under CC BY.

Music compilations where 100% of proceeds are donated to Red Cross and other charities
Two projects are calling for net musicians to submit their music, graphic design, video, and photography for compilations where all proceeds will be donated to charitable organizations helping Japan, like the Red Cross. InternetLabel is calling for music submissions by April 1st and for art submissions by April 11. The InternetLabel compilation will be released under a CC BY-NC-SA license. Impurfekt, which is focusing specifically on art influenced by Japanese culture, is calling for submissions by April 15. The Impurfekt compilation will be released under a CC BY-NC-ND license.

Architecture for Humanity
Architecture for Humanity, a strong supporter of CC license use in its Open Architecture Network and for crisis recovery centers for Haiti and New Orleans, is asking for support for similar reconstruction building efforts in Japan.

OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap set up a disaster information sharing site at www.sinsai.info in Japanese, in addition to an English landing page for the disaster where you can contribute to improving map data for Japan. Like all its data, OpenStreetMap’s data set for the Sendai region is available under CC BY-SA.

Google Person Finder
Although it doesn’t use CC, the Google Person Finder is an open source Google app that was developed in response to the Haiti earthquake and that has been adapted for the missing person database for Japan. You can use the Google Person Finder to search for loved ones, and find out more about how it works here.