New Featured Commoner – Ottmar Liebert

Mia Garlick, November 15th, 2005

Ottmar Liebert is our new Featured Commoner. Ottmar composes, performs and records music in a Nouveau Flamenco style. Seven of his albums have gone platinum and two other albums gold; he has also been nominated for a Grammy. He uses the Creative Commons Sampling Plus license to make large amounts of his music available to the public for remixing. Read more about Ottmar’s musical background and his experience with CC licensing here.

Opsound Transit

Mike Linksvayer, November 10th, 2005

Pioneering CC label Opsound launched a completely redesigned site in September, adding a podcast, stream, forum, happenings, and tags.

If you’re into innovative and free sounds, check out Opsound now.

The Opsound news feed is also well worth following. It’s where I discovered SoundTransit, a community collecting field recordings under a CC Attribution license, with a cool travel motif and mapping feature.

What is Science Commons? By John Wilbanks, Science Commons Executive Director

Lawrence Lessig, November 9th, 2005

[This is part of a weekly series written by Lawrence Lessig and
others about the history and future of Creative Commons. If you know others who might find these interesting,
please recommend they sign up at
http://creativecommons.org/about/lessigletter]

Last week, I said this week’s email would describe the Science
Commons. Let me introduce John Wilbanks, executive director of the
Science Commons. Here’s his description:

Science Commons (SC) was launched in early 2005. SC is a part of
Creative Commons – think of us as a wholly owned subsidiary – drawing
on the amazing success of CC licenses, especially the CC community
and iCommons. But we’re also a little different. Whereas CC focuses
on the individual creators and their copyrights, SC by necessity has
a broader focus. That necessity is caused by, for example, the fact
that most scientists sign employee agreements that assign
intellectual property rights to a host institution. Another example
is that scientific journals regularly request that scientific authors
sign over their copyrights, and scientists eagerly do so in return
for citations in what are called “high impact” journals. There’s a
very real collective action problem here: no one individual or
institution has strong incentives to change the system.

But the system is causing problems in the scientific and academic
communities. Scientific articles are locked behind firewalls, long
after their publishers have realized economic returns. This means
that the hot new article about AIDS research can’t be redistributed
much less translated into other languages (where it might inspire a
local researcher to solve a local problem). The difficulties faced
in relation to the “open access” of publications are easy compared
to those presented when we consider access to tools and data.
Published research indicates that nearly half of all geneticists have
been unable to validate research from colleagues due to problems with
secrecy and legal friction.

So Science Commons works on these problems: inaccessible journal
articles, tools locked up behind complex contracts, socially
irresponsible patent licensing, and data obscured by technology or
end-user licensing agreements. We translate this into projects, with
work in three distinctly different project spaces: publishing
(covered by copyright), licensing (covered by patent and contract)
and data (in the US, covered only by contract). We work on agreements
between funders and grant recipients, between universities and
researchers and between funders and universities—all in the service
of opening up scientific knowledge, tools and data for reuse. We
also promote the use of CC licensing in scientific publishing, on the
belief that scientific papers need to be available to everyone in the
world, not simply available to those with enough resources to afford
subscription fees.

The Publishing Project

Scholarly communication in the sciences generally involves three
components: data generated by experimental research, a peer-reviewed
article explaining and interpreting the data, and metadata that
describes or interprets the underlying data or the article.
Traditionally, journal publishers were predominantly responsible for
gathering, distributing and archiving this information.

The Internet and associated digital networks create a range of
opportunities and challenges for changing the nature of what
information gets stored and communicated, how and when it gets
communicated, and how it is marked with metadata to aid in its use
and reuse. Science Commons is devoted to using its legal and
technical expertise to help scientific researchers make the best use
possible of these new communication technologies. For example, some
science publishers experimenting with a new business model for
scholarly communication require authors of peer-reviewed articles to
grant a Creative Commons license in their articles. These publishers
include the Public Library of Science, BioMed Central, and Springer
OpenChoice.

Science Commons also has convened a working group to discuss other
means for better associating research articles with research data and
for standardizing metadata associated with both of these components.

The Licensing Project

In licensing, we work in a focused manner on the funding of disease
research. Such work involves a lot of basic science carried out by
many individuals at a diverse range of institutions, both public and
private, and each with different policies about intellectual property
rights, different licensing agreements, and, to some extent, even
different funders. When the research begins to yield the kinds of
leads that might attract drug company attention, it will be desirable
(both in remuneration, and also in encouragement to pharmaceutical
companies interest and participation) to offer drug companies an
efficient package of rights that covers the basic permissions they
need to turn research into viable drugs and treatment regimens. The
current practice will certainly not allow the benefits of such “one
stop shopping.”

Using Huntington’s Disease research as a case study, Science Commons
is exploring a “technology trust,” which will combine an intellectual
property rights conservancy, patent pool and other related rights-
bundling methods. We are assessing the types of problems of rights-
fragmentation, a range of possible legal solutions to this problem
(including compulsory terms in funder agreements), the institutional
design of the trust or conservancy, and the question of what
institution would be best suited to administer such a trust or
conservancy. While the project aims to produce a method to ameliorate
the problem for Huntington’s, we would hope to provide guidelines for
solving such problems more generally.

The Data Project

In the United States, there is no intellectual property right on data
(there is such a right in the European Union, albeit with mounting
evidence that it was not needed). But current expansions in
intellectual property law could generate an entirely new set of
obstacles to sharing data among scientists or with the public.
Extending intellectual property rights to databases are likely to
result in basic data being locked up, made more expensive, or more
easily subjected to restrictive licensing agreements.

Additionally, there is a wasteful data economy evolving in which raw
data is not made accessible; scientists are either leery of the risks
of losing control over their data or subject to institutional
requirements that mandate a closed approach. Implicit in data sets
are answers to questions the researcher perhaps did not specify –
answers that are a consequence of the throughput of the experiment.
This data could be reused many times over if properly annotated and
preserved. This, however, requires a cultural shift among scientists,
not a technical shift driven by lawyers.

The Science Commons Data project has two aspects. First, we assert
that data should not be covered by intellectual property law. As part
of this project we provide a resource for database providers
struggling with licensing. Second, we are looking to improve on the
data economy by aiding in the construction of an integrated web of
data, papers, tools, and policy with the explicit goal of
facilitating research into brain disease – the NeuroCommons.

John Wilbanks

http://science.creativecommons.org

To link to or comment on this message, go to:
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5695

Week 5 – CC in Review: Lawrence Lessig on Continuing the Movement (Spanish
Version – Thanks to Maria Cristinia Alvite for translation

Archive of Lessig Letters

Support the Commons

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Comics and
movies

Create & remix like a teenager

Mike Linksvayer, November 7th, 2005

Many people have written to tell us about the Pew Internet & American Life report on Teen Content Creators and Consumers, which found an astounding 57 percent of online teens in the U.S. create online content and 19 percent are remixers.

The report doesn’t mention Creative Commons, though the implications are apparently obvious to our correspondents and many in the media, for example this BBC article on the study, which lists Creative Commons as one of two related links (the other being the study itself): participatory culture is only just getting started and flexible copyright licenses are a necessary part of the equation.

Google Goes CC

Mia Garlick, November 4th, 2005

Google now enables CC-customized searching so you can search for Creative Commons-licensed content on either Google or Yahoo!’s Advanced Search page. Creative Commons’ own “Find” page now gives you to option to use either Google or Yahoo! for your searching. With two major search engines now enabling the dissemination of CC-licensed works, this enables greater dissemination of CC-licensed works and establishes CC’s licensing infrastructure as an important component of the Internet.

iLaw, March 2006 in Mexico City

Mia Garlick, November 3rd, 2005

Get ready to broaden your minds and ask the bigger questions of what kind of world of the Internet and all things digital _should_ look like. The next iLaw is scheduled for March 16 & 17, 2006, in Mexico City. Topics to be discussed include intellectual property protection, how changing technologies are affecting policy, law and markets, the globalization of the Net and the implications of entering new markets when you don’t fully understand the legal regimes and the cultural, societal and political impacts of new Internet technologies and how changes in norms are driving changes in markets. The faculty include Professor Yochai Benkler, Professor William Fischer and Creative Commons’ own CEO & Chairman Lawrence Lessig. The details about the seminar and the program are available in English and Spanish. Get ready to broaden your mind.

Words from CCed CNet Article Ring Around the World

Mia Garlick, November 3rd, 2005

Back in October, CNET Executive Editor Tom Merrit wrote a piece about Creative Commons considering the question “Does Creative Commons free your content?” Creative Commons’ international partners wanted to share the article with their colleagues and fellow countrymen – but the drawback was that it was only available in English. Luckily, Tom was able to persuade the CNET legal department to license the text of the article under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Now the article is available in Japanese, Hebrew, Italian and Spanish…with possible more translations in the works. A great example of Creative Commons licenses enabling dialogue across geographic and linguistic boundaries.

CC in Review: Lawrence Lessig on Continuing the Movement

Lawrence Lessig, November 2nd, 2005

[This is part of a weekly series written by Lawrence Lessig and
others about the history and future of Creative Commons. If you know others who might find these interesting,
please recommend they sign up at
http://creativecommons.org/about/lessigletter]

From last week’s episode:

Thus we use our licenses to build the freedoms authors want upon a
reinforced layer of “fair use” freedoms. Creative Commons is thus
“fair use”-plus: a promise that any freedoms given are always in
addition to the freedoms guaranteed by the law.

That’s the end of the background. Next week I will describe some of
the fun stuff Creative Commons has built, and some more about where
we’re going.

The story continues:

About two months ago, a friend asked:

I don’t get what Creative Commons is, beyond a bunch of servers
serving up licenses to people around the world. Why would you need
support?

The question was completely understandable. Most who see us just see
us through our licenses. Yet there’s a great deal more to what we’re
doing. And my aim over the next few weeks is to describe that great
deal more.

This email is just a start (I promised to keep these short). Its aim
is to describe the initial core of CC.

When Creative Commons was launched in December, 2002, we had a
simple, narrow focus — to spread Creative Commons licenses. The
organization was housed in the basement of Stanford Law School. The
tiny staff worked so hard that some at Stanford thought they lived
there too.

The aim at the time was straightforward: to explain why Creative
Commons licenses mattered. We did that with lectures, with stories
for the press, and even with Flash.

Slowly, we found traction. MIT’s OpenCourseWare project used CC
licenses to free an extraordinary range of content for anyone to
build upon or share. Rice University’s Connexions project did the
same. And Tim O’Reilly gave us over 500 titles from O’Reilly Press to
release under free licenses, including some under a license (the
Founders’ Copyright) that voluntarily reduces the term of copyright
to just 14 (or 28) years.

Very soon into the project, we started getting emails from around the
world asking how others in other countries could participate too.
Technically, our licenses were designed to work anywhere in the
world. But this enthusiasm went far beyond the desire to adopt US-
based licenses.

So early on we launched the “iCommons Project.” Headquartered in
Berlin, the initial aim of the iCommons Project was to coordinate
with volunteers from around the world to develop versions of our
licenses that were tuned to the law of local jurisdictions. Japan was
the first, developing a license based in Japanese law that could also
be used anywhere in the world. These localized licenses would then
link to a translated “Commons Deed” (remember, the simple plain
English (and now, plain-Japanese, Spanish, French, etc…) explanation
of the license), and then to a universal set of metadata that would
make the freedoms attached to the content understandable by computers.

See http://creativecommons.org/worldwide/#more

iCommons quickly exploded. Soon we had volunteers from over 70
countries around the world interested in porting our licenses to
their local law. And as countries completed the project, I began
trekking across the world to celebrate the launch of Creative Commons
internationally. With Slovenia’s launch this last weekend, there are
now 24 jurisdictions that have gone live. And a bunch more will
become live very soon.

This is the core of what CC has been — making free licenses work
wherever we can. But that’s just the beginning of the work we’ve
done. Next, we’ll describe the Science Commons. And after that,
another major new international project.

Stay tuned.

—–

One final fundraising related bit of news: As you know, I’m writing
these letters as part of our annual fundraising campaign. This letter
might begin to help you see why such a campaign is needed. But I
wanted to tell you about a new feature to this campaign: We’re asking
our supporters to add a Creative Commons button to their site, to
help grow the Commoners Movement. Please support us by adding a
button to any page you might control. You can get the button here.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

To link to or comment on this message, go to:
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5689

Week 4 – CC in Review: Lawrence Lessig on CC & Fair Use (Spanish
Version – Thanks to Maria Cristinia Alvite for translation

Archive of Lessig Letters

Support the Commons

Learn More

Comics and
movies

Creative Commons on vinyl

Mike Linksvayer, November 1st, 2005

New vinyl label Unlockedgroove is releasing LPs under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike-2.5 License:

As long as Moby doesn’t steal our stuff and make a billion dollars off of it, we want our music to be reworked

Buy the record from the super cool Forced Exposure catalog and check out Unlockedgroove’s launch events in San Francisco and New York.