Joi Ito at DLD on Creative Commons

Fred Benenson, January 31st, 2009

Creative Commons’ CEO, Joi Ito recently gave a talk at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich. If you’ve been waiting to watch a talk introducing Creative Commons to 2009, this is your talk.

Joi first hits on how CC helps innovators (especially those online) lower the transaction costs when dealing with cultural works restricted by copyright law. Moreover, CC has the potential lower costs in much of the same way that the openness of the early Internet enabled start-ups like Google and eBay to lower their transaction costs and innovate. Joi then discusses some of the successes CC has seen in the last year, making for an great overview of what CC has been up to and where we are headed.

(Apologies if this post appears twice in your feed reader, our original post disappeared.)

Macedonia Timeless: CC-Licensed Tourist Video

Cameron Parkins, January 28th, 2009

Macedonia Timeless is the name of a recently produced Macedonian tourist video written and directed by Milcho Manchevski. There is nothing new about these sort of videos being produced, but what is novel is that the video is being released under a CC BY-ND license, a decision that encourages the legal sharing of the video.

If the point of Macedonia Timeless is to drive tourism to Macedonia, then licensing the content in a way that allows legal re-posting shows foresight – fans of the video can upload it to whatever video sharing site they like as long as the provide proper attribution. You can watch the video on YouTube or download it here. Be sure to read Global Voices’ nice analysis of the video as well, which touches upon a variety of issues beyond CC licensing.

CC Talks With: The Global Lives Project

Cameron Parkins, January 23rd, 2009

The Global Lives Project is a project that aims to “record 24 hours in the lives of ten people that roughly represent the diversity our planet’s population.” Accomplishing this via a volunteer-network dispersed through out the globe, GLP aggregates video for these subjects based on a unique spreadsheet approach to understand global demographics. All of the work produced by GLP is released under a CC BY-NC-SA license, a decision explained in the following interview with Global Lives founder David Evan Harris. Read on to learn more about the project, how CC licenses are being used, and how to get involved yourself as a volunteer/contributor.

Give us a bit of background on the Global Lives project. How did you begin? What is your mission?

Global Lives’ mission is to reshape how people around the world perceive cultures, nations and people outside their communities by collaboratively building a video library of human life experience. The content of our video library “lives” online and is regularly presented to the public in unique open-source video installations and screenings. Our shoots so far have taken place in Malawi, Brazil, Japan, China, Indonesia and the US, and we’ve shown our work publicly in most of those countries and a few others.

The Global Lives Project all got started in 2002, during my third year in college, when I was lucky enough to spend eight months living and studying international development in Tanzania, India, the Philippines and the UK as part of the International Honors Program. For the majority of these eight months, I lived with host families. I stayed in a bamboo house in the Philippines, a squatter settlement in Mexico City, and a rural village in northern India, among other places. While I learned a ton during the year about the politics, economics, history and ecology of these countries, the part of the experience that stuck with me the most was sharing the experience of daily life with the families and individuals from these countries.

Today, I can’t read a newspaper article about rice without thinking of my host mother Violeta in Barangay Daja and her rice paddy and water buffalo. The experience forever changed the way I understand people from other cultures and nations and my own role in the world. And I wanted to bring that experience to people who didn’t have the same opportunities to travel abroad as I did. So I came up with the idea of Global Lives. What I didn’t expect was that so many other people would find the idea to be so interesting, and that it would resonate so well with people from all over the planet.
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Colbert Invites Discourages More Remixing

Fred Benenson, January 23rd, 2009

After discovering the dozens of unauthorized and possibly infringing remix videos that resulted from his adamant calls not to remix his interview with CC founder, Lawrence Lessig, Stephen Colbert is mad. He’s so mad he featured a new segment and music video challenging fans not to remix his show any more. He reiterated this demand in a staccato a capella, so that fans could clearly understand what he was saying and not sample his words. If someone were to remix his show or audio book, they certainly shouldn’t upload it to the special section of Colbert Nation soliciting uploads, either.

CC Technology Summit Video Available

Nathan Yergler, January 16th, 2009

As noted on the CC Labs blog, video and audio from the December CC Technology Summit is now available:

In December we held our second CC Technology Summit at MIT in Cambridge, MA. I think the day provided a great perspective on what we’re doing at CC and how others are building a real community around it. If you weren’t able to attend, we now have audio and video available. And if you missed the first one, the video for that is available as well.

We’re currently thinking about plans for the next event; if you have feedback or suggestions, email them to techsummit@creativecommons.org.

Files seeded for Valkaama, “open source movie”

Michelle Thorne, January 16th, 2009

The source files have been seeded for Valkaama, a fresh collaborative “open source movie”, filmed in Krakow, Poland.  Director Tim Baumann intends to complete the post-production of the full feature movie publicly, with the help of volunteers both amateur and professional:

Here all available media sources are published in order to give you the chance to build upon them. If you want to participate in this project, by helping finishing the movie, creating remixes, making a new trailer or if you want to publish anything else here which is related to Valkaama, please get in touch with us.

Valkaama (trailer) is a drama set in Sweden and Finland and produced by drama school students and amateurs in and around Krakow. It tells the story of two disparate young men, each seeking his fortune, thrown together by fate to travel to “Valkaama”. As their paths cross, they do not realize how much of their journey has already been determined by their pasts.

Open Source and Open Content movies are still a rarity. Valkaama is one of the first movies not only to be distributed freely, but also to guarantee free access to all source data used and created during the production process. The project uses CC BY-SA 3.0 licenses to guarantee very flexible use and reuse of the produced material. Almost every text, picture and video, as well as all downloadable media, is tagged with a respective license. In some cases the licenses are included in the media files themselves.

Happy remixing!

Muted on YouTube? Think CC!

Fred Benenson, January 14th, 2009

As you might have heard by now, YouTube has begun to mute videos containing ‘unauthorized’ music or audio. What does ‘unauthorized’ mean? We’ll leave that for the lawyers to decide, but it probably has something to do with negotiating permissions for the right to use music in advance from rights holders.

Instead of dealing with the suits, why not consider using Creative Commons music in your next YouTube video? Here’s a ccMixter playlist of 100 Attribution licensed music tracks that you can download and use freely so long as you give attribution to the original creator. YouTube has even been so kind as to include these tracks inside their AudioSwap feature, thereby enabling you to automatically add a soundtrack to your video even after it has been uploaded to YouTube.

Al Jazeera Launches Creative Commons Repository

Fred Benenson, January 13th, 2009

Al Jazeera is releasing 12 broadcast quality videos today shot in Gaza under Creative Commons’ least restrictive Attribution license. Each professionally recorded video has a detailed information page and is hosted on blip.tv allowing for easy downloads of the original files and integration into Miro. The value of this footage is best described by an International Herald Tribune/New York Times article describing the release:

In a conflict where the Western news media have been largely prevented from reporting from Gaza because of restrictions imposed by the Israeli military, Al Jazeera has had a distinct advantage. It was already there.

More importantly, the permissive CC-BY license means that the footage can be used by anyone including, rival broadcasters, documentary makers, and bloggers, so long as Al Jazeera is credited.

There’s more information over at Al Jazeera’s CC repository, and in our press release. You can also add the Al Jazeera repository to your Miro feeds by clicking here.

Make: television

Cameron Parkins, January 12th, 2009

Make: television is a new TV program from the wonderful crew behind MAKE Magazine that focuses on DIY culture and “celebrates “Makers” – the inventors, artists, geeks and just plain everyday folks who mix new and old technology to create new-fangled marvels.”

The show began airing on public television (broadcast/cable tv) a little over a week ago and is also available on Legal Torrents, blip.tv, Vimeo, YouTube, and iTunes. The show is released under a CC BY-NC-SA license and available for download in HD, allowing all those inventive DIY-ers watching the show the ability to remix and reuse the content under the terms specified.

CC Talks With: Deproduction

Cameron Parkins, January 12th, 2009

Deproduction is a Denver-based video production company that has a variety of media incarnations, from Public Access TV aggregate Denver Open Media to civic pixel, an open-source web development group. All the material produced for DOM is released under a CC BY-NC-SA license, making it freely sharable and remixable as long as the creators are properly attributed, reproductions are noncommercial in intent, and any derivative works are shared under the same license. The project has been so successful that the team behind it recently received a Knight NewsChallenge Grant to reproduce their system at Public Access TV stations around the U.S. We caught up with Tony Shawcross, Executive Director at Deproduction, to learn more about their operation, how they are using CC licenses at DOM, and why Public Access TV is important.

Can you give our readers some background on Deproduction? How did you get started, who is involved, and what do you do?

The early history is summarized in a great Apogee Magazine Article from 2004, back when we were still a 2-person organization. In the 5 years since, the organization grew from collaborations with a handful of local nonprofits, including Free Speech TV, Little Voice Productions, Just Media, and the Pan African Arts Society. We had been producing videos for nonprofit partners, and began expanding our media education programs through work with local schools and an office in the PS1 Charter School. In 2005, Denver’s City Council shut down the City’s Public Access TV Station and issued an RFP from organizations who had a plan for making Public Access TV work with no operating support from the city or Comcast.

We responded, borrowing from the models of Wikipedia, Current TV, and others to develop online systems that could enable our community members to manage the station. Where most Public Access TV stations have staff devoted to content ingest, metadata entry, quality-control, equipment reservations, class registrations, broadcast scheduling and so-on, our tools enable the community to complete all those tasks with minimal staff involvement. Furthermore, our approach to studio productions, editing and even training work to reduce the workload on our staff and maximize the cooperation and support of our members.
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