User Serratiago has used Blender to convert the original data from the Radiohead video into a set of coordinates that can be printed into a real-life 3D sculpture of Thom Yorke’s head. Since the original data is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, that means Serriago’s derivative is as well. What’s great about this story is that Serratiago didn’t need to ask Thom Yorke, Radiohead, or anyone for permission to make and distribute his work, as the Creative Commons license had already established it!

So if you own a 3D printer, you can download the data and get started. If you need a 3D printer, you should check out MakerBot, an open source project brought to you by the guys behind Thingiverse.

After last week’s exciting announcement that Google Image search is now capable of filtering results by usage rights, we realized there is a lot of interest in how creators can signal their work as being CC-licensed to both humans and robots.

Fortunately, CC has a solution for this that is not only a standard, but recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Its called the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language and is part of the semantic web. Without getting too technical, ccREL uses a technology called RDFa to express licensing information to machines so that they can deduce the same facts about a work (such as its title, author, and most importantly, its license) that humans can. If you’re interested in the future of the web and structured data, you’ll want to check out our wiki pages on RDFa, ccREL, and our white paper submitted to the W3C. Google has a page explaining RDFa and Yahoo has a page explaining how RDFa is used by Yahoo Search.

The easiest way to signal to both humans and robots that your content is CC licensed is to head over to our license chooser and choose a license to put on your own site.

Our license chooser automatically generates the proper ccREL code, so its easy! Don’t forget to fill out the “Additional Information” section. You’ll then get a snippet of XHTML embed that will contain ccREL. Place this near your work (preferably on its same page of the work which also happens to be unique) and you’re all set. If you’re running an entire content community, you can also dynamically generate this markup based on the particular user, title of the work and so on. Check out Thingiverse for a excellent example of this functionality.

Are you already using ccREL or RDFa on your website or platform? Let us know or add it to our Wiki page!

Just a reminder that the Creative Commons Salons NYC is happening tomorrow night!

Creative Commons Salons in NYC have been building momentum and tomorrow is our February salon. Come out to have some beers with the CC community (don’t worry, we’ll open it up early this time) watch some cool presentations, and meet some new faces in the free culture space. Since we’ve outgrown our original space, The Open Planning project, February’s Salon is back at For Your Imagination‘s loft space.

February’s Salon will feature presentations by Bre Pettis on Thingiverse.com‘s CC integration, blip.tv’s CEO Mike Hudack demoing new features of the CC-friendly video site, and co-CEOs Dan Zaccagnino and Matt Siegel from Indaba Music, talking about their recent work on Colbert v. Lessig remix shenanigans.

Here are the details:

Tuesday, February 24th from 7-10pm
For Your Imagination Loft
22 W. 27th St., 6th Floor
Between Broadway & 6th Ave.
New York, NY

We’ll have free (as in beer) beer for the reception afterward. If you’ve didn’t make it to any past CC Salons, don’t miss this one, and if you did, you’ll know to come early as space is limited.

RSVP to the event via Facebook or by e-mailing me: fred [at] creativecommons.org.

Creative Commons Salons in NYC have been building momentum and it is now time for our February salon. Come out to have some beers with the CC community (don’t worry, we’ll open it up early this time) watch some cool presentations, and meet some new faces in the free culture space. Since we’ve outgrown our original space, The Open Planning project, February’s Salon is back at For Your Imagination‘s loft space.

February’s Salon will feature presentations by Bre Pettis on Thingiverse.com‘s CC integration, blip.tv’s CEO Mike Hudack demoing new features of the CC-friendly video site, and co-CEOs Dan Zaccagnino and Matt Siegel from Indaba Music, talking about their recent work on Colbert v. Lessig remix shenanigans.

Here are the details:

Tuesday, February 24th from 7-10pm
For Your Imagination Loft
22 W. 27th St., 6th Floor
Between Broadway & 6th Ave.
New York, NY

We’ll have free (as in beer) beer for the reception afterward. If you’ve didn’t make it to any past CC Salons, don’t miss this one, and if you did, you’ll know to come early as space is limited.

RSVP to the event via Facebook or by e-mailing me: fred [at] creativecommons.org.

Thingiverse is an “object sharing” site that enables anyone to upload the schematics, designs, and images for their projects. Users can then download and reuse the work in their projects using their own laser cutters, 3D printers, and analog tools. Think of it as a Flickr for the Maker set.

Besides implementing our licenses, Bre and Zach have also gone the distance and allowed users to license works under the GNU GPL, LGPL, and BSD licenses, as well as allowing them to release works into the public domain. Thingiverse uses our license wrappers for each of these licenses thereby enabling automatic indexing by machines like search engines.

Pushing the envelope even further, Thingiverse also fully implements our RDFa specification (just take a look at the source of any page with a CC license to see RDFa in action) for expressing licensing and authorship information on the semantic web. This means that aside from telling machines that a work is licensed under CC, Thingiverse also tells machines the title of a work, its author, and other interesting semantic information.

If you’re looking for a fantastic example of how to implement the commons on a platform designed for sharing creativity, look no further than Thingiverse.

(The Polyalphabetic Substitution Cipher Slide Rule by nickfarr under CC BY-SA)