If you’re in Los Angeles tonight, please stop by REDCAT (631 W 2nd St, LA, CA 90012) for an installation of Into Infinity – the CC-licensed art and music project that explores the infinite possibilities of recombination and reuse. Dublab is producing tonight’s event, which will include collage projections of Into Infinity’s visual art and a live improv performance of Into Infinity’s hundreds of eight-second audio loops. The event is free and open to people of all ages. Schedule is below.

6-7:30pm: DJ sets by the Dublab DJs
7:30pm: Mi Casa Es Su Casa screening
8-9pm: Into Infinity eye & ear collage performed by Ale, Cantaloupe, frosty, Jimmy Tamborello, and matthewdavid.

If you’re not in the area or can’t make it out tonight – don’t worry. We’re going to put the audio from the performance online. You can also make your own Into Infinity combinations at home by playing with the project’s nesting feature and audio mixer.

If you’re in Los Angeles, please consider stopping by the GOOD Space (6824 Melrose Ave., LA, CA 90038) this Wednesday, March 11, at 7pm for an event that GOOD is hosting in conjunction with Knight Pulse called GOOD Community Leaders.

Representatives from five social initiatives will offer short presentations about their work and talk about some of their ideas for expanding the reach of their respective projects. I’ll be talking about Creative Commons – specifically about the importance of effectively communicating CC’s work to the general public. Edgar Arceneaux (Watts House Project), Erik Knudson and Kelly Coyne (Urban Homestead), Alissa Walker (Design LA), and Sonja Rasula (Unique LA) will also be presenting.

Admission is free. Red Stripe is providing free beer, and the event is 21+. RSVP is required; more info is available on GOOD’s blog.

CC Birthday Party in Manila

The globe lit up last week to celebrate the birthday of a community and organization now in its sixth year. Creative Commons, as demonstrated by these events, is about more than just free legal tools — it’s a powerful idea that has spread the world over.

In Chennai the CC Birthday Party merged with the launch of the Wikipedia Academy on Dec. 12, coinciding with a visit from Jimmy Wales and Sue Gardener from the Wikimedia Foundation. Chennai’s Free Culture House, a co-working space founded by party planner Kiruba Shankar, hosted the celebration. Seoul joined in with a Birthday Party on the same day, organized by CC Korea.

An award ceremony for the second CC photography contest impressed guests at the Beijing party on Dec. 14, featuring a live remix of the photos. The next day Belgrade conducted a panel on the legal framework of Free Culture with presentations by CC Serbia, Wikimedia Serbia, and Free Software groups.

Entry for 2nd CC Photography Contest in Mainland China

On Dec. 16, seven cities held CC Birthday Parties. In Guatemala writers released a special gift: 10 Christmas stories compiled in Aguinaldo Narrable, which will be illustrated by six award-winning photographs from CC Guatemala‘s Fiesta Callejera Contest.

Ann Arbor, Michigan organized a CC Birthday Happy Hour at a local bar, and guests at the party in Washington, D.C. contributed to a CC multimedia potluck coordinated by Public Knowledge.

The first anniversary of the ported 3.0 Licenses in the Philippines was commemorated in Manila, following a planning meeting for the upcoming CC Asia Pacific Conference. In Yuletide tradition and CC’s spirit of sharing, CC Philippines concluded the day by walking through Manila’s streets and sharing food and gifts to children.

CC Australia screened CC films and raised contributions for our annual fundraising campaign at the Brisbane CC Christmas Birthday Movie Night. New York City recounts that Happy Birthday may or may not have been sung at their Dec. 16 party in FYI, and Los Angeles teamed up LA’s Geek Dinner for an evening of free culture and internets in uWink.

Berlin‘s Content Sprint & Birthday Party invited guests to vie for a Goopymart T-shirt in a competition to document CC Case Studies in Germany.

California hosted the last CC Birthday Parties of the year, with co-housing and co-working community organizers initiating a round of discussions about Free Culture, free speech, and sustainable communities in Berkeley.

San Francisco wrapped up the global parties in 111 Minna Gallery with music by Ripley and Kid Kameleon and an improv performance from dublab as part of the Into Infinity installation.

With 14 host cities and a stellar range of events, the CC community is demonstrating tremendous support for Creative Commons. A heartfelt thank you to all the party planners and guests!

Please take a moment and help make another year of CC possible!

Images: (Ann Arbor) “Long table full of revellers” and “Garin, Ted, and CC swag” by mollyali under CC BY NC; (Chennai) “121220082360” and “121220082330” by Kiruba Shankar under CC NC SA; (Beijing) 舞在山乡 优秀奖 under 作者：秦启胜  CC BY ; (Manila) “CC-PH Technical/Documentation / AUSL-ITC“ and “Outreach / Sharing” by CC Philippines under CC BY NC; (DC) “CC 6th birthday party Washington DC” by tvol under CC BY; (Education Network Australia) “Sparklers and cake to celebrate“ by edna-photos under CC NC; (CC Cupcakes) “P1070155“ by creativecommoners under CC BY; (LA) “Happy 6th Birthday Creative Commons!“ posted by felicity redwell from netZoo/revolute under CC NC ND; (Guatemala) “MBosque” by Renata Avila under CC BY.

If you’re in Los Angeles over the next two weeks, GOOD is hosting a series called GOOD December from Friday, 12/5 through Friday 12/19 in their new space on Melrose Avenue. It’s open to the public from 11am-5pm every day and will offer salons, panel discussions, meals, and more. There will be occasional parties in the evening hours that require an RSVP; check out the GOOD December site for more details. There’s also a nice write-up about it at Flavorpill with some useful info.

Creative Commons is collaborating with GOOD on two of the ongoing pieces of the series. One is an installation of Into Infinity – the art and music project we’re producing with Dublab. The other is a set of podcast interviews about the culture of sharing that I conducted with Jimmy Wales, Chris Hughes, Chris Dibona, Caterina Fake, Curt Smith, Joi Ito and a variety of other luminaries who use sharing as a cornerstone to work they do across a variety of fields. Snippets of the interviews will be running throughout the series’ two weeks – grab a set of headphones and listen up!

By contrast, on ccMixter, we’ve turned to a ‘call for remixes’ model where we get the artist to put the stems for an entire album into the Commons and keep it there. Therefore the concept of a ‘deadline’ seems mute. The best part is that the rights to the remixes are retained by the artist. This has proven to be much more amenable to the community and it has responded with 1,000s of remixes to calls by DJ Vadim, Bucky Jonson, Trifonic,Calendar Girl, Brad Sucks and Shannon Hurley.

Shannon exemplifies the new hybrid sharing+business model because when we she was ready to put together an album of remixes she licensed, for a fee, the remixes from the producers for the album “Second Light: The Ready to Wake Up Remixes” (AMIE Street, CD Baby and iTunes).

She will be performing the remixes with Ben Eisen on bass, Sam Cunningham on drums, and “my apple notebook” in Los Angeles on December 10th. This gig will be quite the party as ccMixter producer DJ Doughy will be flying from Kansas City, Mo. and I’ll be making a special trip to LA for this event as well. (There is a $12 charge at the door.)

Shannon Hurley Remix Album Release Party
Wed. Dec. 10th
8pm sharp, all ages
Genghis Cohen (map)
740 N. Fairfax Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90046
$12 admission

Our latest call has special significance because we’ve been trying to get indie star State Shirt for a while and he’s come through in a big way. Not only did he put his entire “This is Old” album, stems, a cappellas and all, into the Commons but his plan is to use the remixes themselves as source material for a new album of original music. State is a master songwriter who writes and performs in an “energetic and ridiculously catchy” way according to DoKashiteru who should know: his DnB smasher remix was an Editor Pick minutes after upload.

The State Shirt call is: “Remix Me So I Can Remix You”

He says: “Creative Commons is the perfect antidote for a collapsing landscape still clinging to traditional copyright. I hope more artists discover that freedom, flexibility, collaboration and community are now an option. I also hope that my fellow ccMixters would want to get involved with me, in both the creation and re-creation of music.”

There are a few photos of the event online at Flickr, in the creativecommoners CC Salon LA set.

Update: Thanks to Flavorpill for pointing people our way. Also thanks to boredLA for coming through, checking out what we’re all about, and posting a great event write-up.

A reminder that TONIGHT CC Salon LA returns with a fantastic combination of presenters – joining us will be web radio collective Dublab and Lucas Gonze, net-label theorist and XSPF developer.

Both presentations will discuss how CC, and ‘openness’ in general, is affecting web radio and net labels, both from an economic and artistic vantage, with a Q&A to follow each. Additionally, Dublab will ask salon attendees to create noise – both as a group and as individuals – which will be recorded and turned into audio loops that will be used for the Into Infinity project, a new art exhibition produced in collaboration with Creative Commons.

The Salon will be taking place at the always wonderful FOUND Gallery (Google map) between 7:30PM – 9:30PM. Follow the event on Upcoming, mark attending on Facebook, and make sure to come down and hear from two exemplary members of the CC community on their experiences with open licensing. As always, there will be free (as in beer) drinks for the entire night.

For those based in Los Angeles, USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy is hosting a day long event, Fair Use and The Future of the Commons, next Monday (10/27) that focuses on fair use, copyright reform, and the notion of the ‘commons’. The entire lineup looks fascinating and CC’s Creative Director, Eric Steuer, will be speaking on a panel discussion titled “Agents of Change”. From IML:

With fear, uncertainty and misinformation dominating the discourse of copyright and intellectual property, Fair Use has become one of the most vexing issues in today’s academic landscape. This day-long event at USC’s Annenberg Research Park addresses these issues head-on with a series of presentations and discussions with key players in the advancement and redefinition of fair use, coupled with a faculty showcase and hands-on workshops at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The goal of this event is to bring clarity to questions of fair use for scholars and educators working with copyrighted media for research, teaching and electronic publication. We believe this event will facilitate some much-needed discussion of the state of contemporary Fair Use and where we should be setting our sights for the future. The event is free and open to the public – further details and schedule to be announced soon!

The event will take place at Kerckhoff Hall in the Annenberg Research Park (Google Map) between 9AM-6PM and is free and open to the public.

One last reminder that we are hosting the latest CC Salon LA tonight (9/3/08). Details below:

• WHO: Xeni Jardin, Tech Culture Journalist + co-editor at Boing Boing, Casey Caplowe, Creative Director at GOOD Magazine
• WHAT: Discussions of openness in journalism with live music provided by Vosotros
• WHEN: Tonight, 7:30PM – 9:30PM
• WHERE: FOUND Gallery in Silverlake (Google map)
• PRICE: Free entry and free drinks
• NETWORK:Upcoming // Facebook

Looking forward to seeing you all there!