Flash/AfterEffects/Video Design Person Wanted

Glenn Otis Brown, November 24th, 2004

We’d like to produce a short, new animated/motion graphics film, and we need a great designer and/or animator to help us do so on a fairly tight deadline. You should know how to animate in Flash or After Effects (or both) and have experience with any necessary drawing tools, like Adobe Illustrator. You should have the confidence and skill to help us produce a film of at least the caliber of our previous pieces. No need to be a writer (we’ll collaborate on the script) or an audio engineer (though if you are one or know one, that’s great). Location in the Bay Area and enthusiasm for the work of Creative Commons are big bonuses. Send an email ASAP to press@creativecommons.org if you are interested. Please include (1) a CV, (2) a list of the animated or graphic design pieces you’ve done, (3) a link to any such pieces that are now online, and (4) all your contact information. Thanks!

Opsound Party: CBGB NYC December 2

Mike Linksvayer, November 24th, 2004

If you’re in New York City get over to CBGB Lounge next Thursday for a party celebrating Opsound’s first CD release.

Buy the CD and download the MP3s by the band Catalpa Catalpa. All tracks are CC licensed, as is everything in the Opsound Pool.

Congratulations to Opsound founder Sal Randolph and all of the Opsound artists!

Perdition Remix Contest

Mike Linksvayer, November 24th, 2004

Positron! Records, whose recent adoption of Creative Commons licenses was noted on this weblog two days ago, is encouraging users to take advantage of their first licensed album with a remix contest. They’ve helpfully made a remix kit containing vocal tracks and loops from the target track, Perdition.

[via Rob Myers]

ccPublisher Updated: Now With More Crunchy Metadata!

Nathan Yergler, November 24th, 2004

Just in time for Thanksgiving (and yet another thing to be thankful for), we’ve released an update to ccPublisher. ccPublisher 0.9.9 (windows, mac) adds support for Internet Archive keywords and description information. Supplying this information will allow visitors to the Archive find your work, become your fan, and stalk you by going through your trash. Well, probably (hopefully?) not the last one, but you get the picture: better exposure through metadata.

Not familiar with ccPublisher? Check out our initial release announcement.

This is hopefully our final beta release before 1.0, so download it and give it a try. You can email me bugs, or (even better) submit them at SourceForge.  Enjoy!

Thanksgiving

Glenn Otis Brown, November 24th, 2004

Tomorrow the U.S. celebrates Thanksgiving. It’s my favorite holiday. Just as the days are getting dark too soon, the wind (even here in Northern California) getting a precocious frost to it, and the mad dash towards yet another big milestone New Year taking stride with only an imaginary starter’s whistle blown, we’re obliged to pause. To reunite with friends and loved ones. To think about why we’ve done so. To say thanks for everyone and everything we’ve got, however much we might or might not deserve it. Yes, it sounds corny and quaint. But that’s me.

Most times, with most people I know, we say our thanks to God, or to life. I’m all for both but tend to prefer to do so privately. What I’ve always wanted to do very publicly — but have never done, as far as I remember — is to say thanks to people. Doubtless it’s not an original idea, but we at this organization, if you’ve noticed, really like unoriginality.

So, thanks to people. Thanks, Creative Commons, for my job.

A job’s not a person, but it is people. For me the most important thing about Creative Commons, even beyond the concept and the service (which I sort of dig, too), is the people. That’s the staff, the board, our advisors, volunteers, sponsors, supporters — all of whom I’ll talk about some later — but it’s really more about the wildly great number of you using the tools or re-using their fruits in ways we never anticipated.

I was first drawn to study copyright and cyberlaw, I remember pretty clearly, because most cases were ultimately stories about weird and interesting people. Plaintiff or Defendant or often both, they were people who wanted to become bigger people by extending their voices. In school or now, that’s subject matter — that’s a vocation — to be thankful for.

As a bonus, the people studying and arguing copyright law were, and remain, the weirdest and most interesting lawyers.

So, take the union of those two groups of weird and interesting people, add the Internet and some civics lessons from pioneers of coding, and you’ve got a nice candidate for your gratitude.

Stay tuned for more givings of thanks (if you can stomach any more earnestness) in a series of blog posts about a specific few of the people above.

SF MOMA and the University of Maine

Neeru Paharia, November 22nd, 2004

I had the pleasure of speaking on two panels recently. Last Thursday, I participated in The Open Source Paradigm at the SF MOMA, an event aimed to explore the history of open-source, and find new applications of its concepts in art. A few interesting ideas came out of the panel including a No Military Use license, and how it benefits everyone to open-source your french fries (in this case, sharing is good because it keeps you skinny and wins favor with your friends). Attribution to Greg Niemeyer for the fries, and a gentleman from the audience for the No Military Use license. The event was presented by SMAC, the San Francisco Media Arts Council.

On Saturday I was at The Conference of the Intellectual Commons at The University of Maine. It was amazing to hear several speakers mention Creative Commons throughout the day, including Hal Abelson, Board member of Creative Commons, who gave a great talk on MIT’s OpenCourseWare and DSpace. This conference was intended, at least partially, to initiate a conversation as to how the Univesity of Maine could become a leader in open-access publishing, and in a “some rights reserved” approach in general.

Rediscover Culture with Firefox & CC Search

Mike Linksvayer, November 22nd, 2004

Cool thing about Firefox 1.0 number 75387: access to the Creative Commons search engine is built in. If you’re already using Firefox 1.0, just click on the search drop-down to the upper right of the browser window and select Creative Commons. If you’re not using Firefox, get with the program!

The Creative Commons search engine crawls the web for content marked with Creative Commons license metadata and utilizes the same to help you find content to use and build upon, under terms you’re willing to accept — Semantic Web, anyone? We’ve had a prototype up since March and soft launched the current Nutch-based engine in September. Firefox integration is a major step forward.

Searching for “free culture” via Firefox 1.0 and the Creative Commons search engine.

Another non-evil label: Positron!

Mike Linksvayer, November 22nd, 2004

Positron! Records follows the lead of the non-evil record label, Magnatune:

Positron! Records is pleased to announce that our artists now have the option of releasing their works under Creative Commons licenses.

Unlike those who suffer from what we like to call “major label retardation,” we here at Positron! have never believed it was bad thing for our supporters to share our music with their friends. The Creative Commons licenses we use legally allow you to share songs from these records on peer-to-peer networks. In addition, you can sample portions of these songs for use in your own compositions, whether they are mash-ups for your friends, or a commercial release. It is our way of both thumbing our nose at the ridiculous state of copyright law in this country, and letting you, our customer and supporter, know that you are not a criminal, but a trusted ally in the war against corporate stupidity.

[via Lucas Gonze]

Creative Commons France licenses now available

Glenn Otis Brown, November 22nd, 2004

This Friday at the National Assembly in Paris, Creative Commons released the French versions of our licenses.

Hats off to project lead Melanie Dulong de Rosnay and the rest of the Creative Commons France team.

France joins Austria, Brazil, Canada, Finland, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, and Taiwan in offering localized Creative Commons licenses.

Read the press release.

Engadget on mashups, call for tutorials

Matt Haughey, November 19th, 2004

Engadget is a great all-around blog about technology and the latest gadgets, but in the past few weeks they’ve began doing a “podcast” which is sort of like a home-brewed radio show, saved as mp3s and shared on their site. This week’s podcast has an interesting segment on “Mashing the Planet,” their call to arms (here in text) to teach people how to use audio tools to make mashups (including legal ones with the WIRED CD) and especially to create good tutorials so anyone can pick up an audio program and make something good.

I chopped the segment out of the show here, and it’s about 5 minutes long. They discuss the state of audio tools, the lack of tutorials, Creative Commons, and the music industry’s reaction to mashups.

A few months ago, we brainstormed ways to improve the Creative Commons site and part of it was writing lots of tutorials for how to use applications like Photoshop, ACID, and iMovie to make images, audio, and video using existing freely downloadable Creative Commons licensed works. We quickly found out it’s a big endeavor and hope the Mash the Planet idea blossoms into a full-on tutorial website we can someday point users to.