Seems fair. Share and enjoy!

Mike Linksvayer, July 30th, 2004

Last month Norman Walsh started using a Creative Commons license for his essays (consistently informed and provocative on XML, Semantic Web, and other technical topics) and photographs. Norm does us the favor of explaining his choice:

When I started writing this collection of essays, I slapped on a quick copyright statement asserting “All Rights Reserved.” That was simple and easy to do, but it has always struck me as overly conservative.

I wouldn’t release code under such a restrictive license, so why release words or images that way? There’s no good reason, and Creative Commons offers a selection of much more friendly alternatives.

So this morning I’m switching to the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License. In a nutshell, you are free: to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and to make derivative works.

But you have provide attribution (you don’t get to take credit for my work) and you can’t use my work for commercial purposes. At least not without getting my explicit permission first.

Seems fair. Share and enjoy!

A common story, but one that bears repeating when told so simply and well.

By the way, the design of Norm’s site is a real treat. I can see that he has honed every detail. Those with different tastes my see nothing special.

Jessamyn’s convention blogging

Matt Haughey, July 27th, 2004

Jessamyn runs librarian.net, a blog exploring issues in library science and within American libraries, and is currently one of the select few webloggers
covering the Democratic National Convention
. In addition to all her daily posts, her access allows her to share photos from within the convention, and all of it is available for reuse under a Creative Commons license.

Fair Use in Action!

Matt Haughey, July 27th, 2004

We enjoyed the shot above from the completely legal Barbie-in-a-Blender art gallery, from the folks at free culture. The full story behind the site is here.

Lessig’s free book still racking up the sales

Matt Haughey, July 27th, 2004

Stanford Magazine carries a story this month about our chairman and co-founder Lawrence Lessig’s book which has just entered its third printing. This is interesting because the book is freely available online for download (under a Creative Commons license), and has been downloaded about 180,000 times. On the one hand an author can give away free content for folks to remake into audio books, translations, and other formats, and the author still gets paid through traditional book sales. Amazing how that works, and works so well sometimes. [via Copyfight]

mozCC Updated, Upgrade Encouraged

Nathan Yergler, July 27th, 2004

I’ve just released an upgrade to mozCC. Everyone’s encouraged to upgrade, as this release fixes an embarassing bug which caused Mozilla and Firefox to lock up under certain situations (say, choosing a Creative Commons license). You can find the release annoucement and installation/upgrade instructions here.

Find another bug? Have a suggestion? Let me know!

CC at OSCON

Nathan Yergler, July 27th, 2004

I’m attending the O’Reilly Open Source Convention this week in Portland, OR. The convention tutorials got started yesterday, and there’s great blog coverage, cataloged here. I’ll be attending tutorials today, and then the conference sessions for the remainder of the week. Track me down, tell me why you love CC and I’ll shower you with schwag. And by shower I mean “give you a button and a bumper sticker.”

Musicians large and small on internet downloading

Matt Haughey, July 26th, 2004

CNN is currently carrying an interesting interview with musician Peter Gabriel. Gabriel always seems to be at the bleeding edge of technology, and he describes two of his net music ventures, On Demand Distribution, a backend company that works on music payment and fulfillment systems, and his pet project with Brian Eno, The Magnificent Union of Digitally Downloading Artists.

When asked why he has embraced the internet while record companies have feared it, Gabriel says:

A new world is being created — one is dying — and if artists don’t get involved, they’re going to get screwed, like they usually do.

At the other end of the musician spectrum, indie rock artists The Mountain Goats recently gave their stamp of approval to the Internet Archive’s hosting of their live shows. Frontman John Darnielle shares why he supports it:

I am totally in favor of tape trading, and file sharing never did anything wrong by me. People got into The Mountain Goats after downloading my stuff.

It’s great to see a superstar like Peter Gabriel continue to embrace and extend technology and it’s also great to see a small artist like The Mountain Goats realize new avenues to gain fans.

Moving in with OSAF

Mike Linksvayer, July 26th, 2004

The CC team at OSAF: Nathan Yergler, Francesca Rodriquez, Mike Linksvayer, Neeru Paharia, Glenn Otis Brown, James Grimmelmann, and Matt Haughey.

Last week Creative Commons moved offices from the Stanford campus to San Francisco into the fantastic space shared by the
Open Source Applications Foundation,
Level Playing Field,
and parts of the Mozilla Foundation.
Mitch Kapor blogged a welcome for OSAF’s new roommates yesterday. We’re very fortunate.

Molt Be

Glenn Otis Brown, July 24th, 2004

That means “very good” in Catalan. I was just browsing through the weblog subscriptions available in NetNewsWire tonight and came across the Catalan blog Sarcophilus.blog and got warm fuzzies: it’s available under a Creative Commons license. Half my family’s Catalan. Anyone know of other cc blogs catalas out there?

Art Mobs in Slate

Matt Haughey, July 22nd, 2004

Slate is running a piece today entitled “Art Mobs” that takes a look at how collaboration between artists has changed as things move online. It covers graphical, film, and text pieces, but the best example is a song. 

We’ve profiled MacJams before, the site built around sharing tracks for Apple’s Garageband users. They’ve got Creative Commons licenses built in and this slate article highlights the final track “Please Eat.” It is the fourth version of an earlier cut, and in the end four different musicians contributed 36 separate tracks to the final song.

I did some digging around and here is the original track, which is licensed under an Attribution license. If you’d like to further mash the track, the final track mentioned is under an Attribution-Noncommercial license.