Creative Commons Joins OCW Consortium

Mia Garlick, October 31st, 2006

Creative Commons recently joined the OpenCourseWare Consortium as an “Affiliate Organization.” The Consortium is a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world - including China, France, Japan, the UK, the USA and Vietnam - who are commited to creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware. “OpenCourseWare” is the free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses.

OpenCourseWare Consortium recently launched the OCW Consortium Portal site, which provides easy access to materials from nearly 3,000 courses openly published by 50 member institutions largely using Creative Commons licenses. Courseware is available in nine languages — English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai — and comes from leading institutions around the world. The site also provides information for schools considering open publication of course materials, including information on handling intellectual property concerns and choosing an appropriate license.

Remix the Remixer

Victor Stone, October 30th, 2006

As ccMixter passed the 5,000 upload mark and our star remixer teru approaches 100 remixes (no accident that his average rating is 4.75 out of 5 by the way) we’re eager to encourage folks with blogs and web pages to check out a new feature that makes it easy to embed dynamic links or Fabricio Zuardi’s Music Player powered by a XSPF playlist into your pages. Appropriately enough we called the feature Publicize. This feature not only applies to remixers, but also their subjects because you can specify that you want the remixes of the artist — hey, 25 remixes of musetta’s “Ophelia’s Song” can’t be wrong. (Publicize here).

Publicize and the new Remix Radio are just two very early features of many that will be falling out of the Query/Formatter API currently under development. Armed with this API developers can query ccMixter in hundreds of ways and ask for the results in a large variety of formats — RSS, XSPF, ATOM, M3U, CSV, AJAX/JSON, etc. as well as pre-formatted HTML. We look forward to mashups of ccMixter remixes and other CC content sites (*cough*).

Version 3.0 - Revised License Drafts

Mia Garlick, October 30th, 2006

New license drafts for version 3.0 for the CC US license and the new generic/unported license have been posted. There have been several new amendments to the licenses — mainly as a result of the discussions on the cc-licenses list, but some as a result of discussions internally and amongst CC’s international affiliates. A first round of comments to the cc-licenses list discussions was posted back at the beginning of September but the bulk of discussions took place after this posting. The issue of the DRM parallel distribution language was debated in earnest. Ultimately, however, the general sentiment on the list does not seem to favor implementation of the DRM parallel distribution language at this stage.

To briefly explain the current round of amendments:

As noted above, these changes, for the most part, reflect list discussions and so hopefully a large amount of further discussion is not necessary and version 3.0 can be implemented shortly. However, if there are further errors or issues identified by people then the discussions will continue for as long as necessary to resolve these.

Red Hat supports CC through employee contribution matching program

Melissa Reeder, October 25th, 2006

Red Hat recently launched a matching sponsorship program for their employees in order to continue their support of Creative Commons. They will match their employees’ donations dollar for dollar up to $5,000.

We’d like to extend a warm thanks to our friends at Red Hat for their continued support — we are very appreciative!

If any other companies are interested in participating in our matching sponsorship program, please contact melissa@creativecommons.org.

CC Values

Lawrence Lessig, October 25th, 2006

[This email is part of a weekly series written by Lawrence Lessig about Creative Commons. If you would like to be removed from this list, please click here. Alternatively, if you know others who might find these interesting, please sign them up here.]

In the four years since we launched CC, the Internet, and the world’s understanding of the Internet, have changed dramatically. In 2002, the media was obsessed by something called “piracy.” Today, they call it “user-generated content.” Just around the time we launched, Wikipedia crossed 100,000 articles; today it is the most important testament to the Internet’s potential to enable something different and extraordinary.

When we started, none of us had any real idea about what the Internet would become. But we all had dreams. Mine was that the Internet would offer something different from the world of analog culture. While many were obsessed with how new technologies would radically change old businesses, I was eager to see the new ways of creating and interacting that would develop. iTunes does better what Tower Records did pretty well. But what would the Internet create in 2010 that didn’t exist (in any significant sense) in 1990?

One dream was what Andy Raskin called in his 2004 “Business 2.0″ article about Creative Commons, the “sharing economy.” The “sharing economy” is different from a traditional commercial economy. It is not simply people working for free. Instead, this is the economy that supports Wikipedia (and free and open source software before that). It is the economy that drives much of the creativity in YouTube and blip.tv. It is the world of “amateur” creators, meaning again, not those whose work is amateurish, but those who do what they do for the love of what they do, and not for the money.

This sharing economy is not meant to displace the commercial economy. Its purpose is not to force Madonna to sing for free. Its aim instead is to enable the millions of other people around the world who are also creative, but who want to create in a different kind of community. The editors who make Wikipedia sing are not people who couldn’t get a job at Encyclopedia Britannica. They instead create for a different reason, within a very different community of creators.

At its core, Creative Commons is designed to support this sharing economy. Our free tools give creators a simple way to signal the rules under which they want to create. And, perhaps more importantly, by signaling clearly and reliably these freedoms, they encourage others who otherwise might hesitate to share and build upon that work. Thus, for example, the Public Library of Science publishes all of its articles under a CC license that gives users the freedom to share those articles broadly. Libraries and institutions around the world can now archive these works and make them available locally. Without the confidence of the CC licenses, no doubt lawyers within these different institutions would have panicked. The CC licenses let that panic be avoided, and invite many (who otherwise would not) to help share and build upon work.

The next challenge is to figure out how this sharing economy interacts with a traditional commercial economy. What happens when Time wants to use a fantastic CC-licensed Flickr photo? Or how does a hit on ccMixter move into the commercial space?

CC will never become a part of that commercial economy. But it is important, I believe, that we play a role in enabling this crossover. The alternative is a world we’re seeing too much of all ready: large entities that create sandboxes for “sharing,” but then effectively claim ownership over everything built within that sandbox. This is, in my view, not a sharing economy. It is instead simple sharecropping.

The key is to build alternatives that creators on the Internet can use to both create as they wish and keep control of their creativity. That’s the challenge I see over the next four years. And as we review over the next few weeks some of the best of CC from around the world, you’ll begin to see how this challenge might be met.

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Week 1: Lawrence Lessig: A Report on the Commons Spanish Version now available thanks to Maria Christinia Alvite.

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CC Mixter on Japanese Blog TV

Francesca Rodriquez, October 23rd, 2006

Our board member Joi Ito passed along this Blog TV spot. Technorati Japan’s Blog TV features CC Mixter on a special portion of this show called Challenge CGCM. Also, check out the woman to the right of the cowboy hat; she prominently displays a CC sticker on her laptop.

CopyCamp conversations

Mike Linksvayer, October 21st, 2006

Canadian history writer Christopher Moore, a really nice guy, writes in a Creators’ Copyright Coalition Op-Ed:

I discussed much the same issue with Mike Linksvayer of Creative Commons USA at Copycamp last month. Nice guy, full of enthusiasm for the technology. But we never could clarify just how the “commercial rights reserved” part of a CC licence would actually work.

Close. We failed to clarify how a CC NonCommercial licence would directly replace a portion of Chris’ current revenue, which if I understood and recall correctly, derives from educational institutions
paying for photocopy and other use of Chris’ works via fees to a collective.

The disconnect is twofold. First, a CC NC licence may permit a nonprofit educational institution to use so licenced works under the licence — without fee. Second, the collective arrangement is working for Chris. He gets some supplemental revenue and presumably very little paperwork comes with it. He has little incentive to try something different that does not have this collecting infrastructure.

It is no surprise that CC licences are not appropriate for everyone. They are another option, built on copyright, and 100 percent voluntary. Writers may wish to not avail themselves of the option for
works already bringing in steady revenue from collective licensing arrangements. Chris continues:

It’s not practical for a user wanting to license commercial uses of perhaps dozens of CC items to chase down each author and try to negotiate a fee. But since CC does not have a collective licensing arm, there seems to be no convenient mechanism for users who want
to comply. Making compliance hard leads to non-compliance, doesn’t it?

I sense an entrepreneurial opportunity for the provision of low transaction cost commercial licencing of CC licenced works. Perhaps some existing collecting socities are well placed to execute on this opportunity. Or perhaps upstarts will do well in this market as established players wait to see what happens. Most likely, some of each.

ScooptWords is one example from the upstart category launched this summer and heralded by CC. Last quote from Chris:

I mean this seriously. I think CC has many useful applications for making things freely available. But is there anyone out there who has ever reserved commercial rights under a CC license and then actually received payment for those rights?

Yes! For example, artists on the Magnatune record label. Magnatune’s business model is releasing music under a NonCommercial licence and selling commercial rights. See a Magnatune blog post highlights some interesting recent deals and an interview with Magnatune founder John Buckman. Unsurprisingly most artists on Magnatune also want a low transaction cost solution: Buckman says the vast majority of artists react to the business model with “Whatever, you take care of the details.”

Two other recent commercial licensing instances mentioned on this blog are BeatPick music and Mercedes Benz and Lonelygirl15’s licensing of music from ccMixter users.

Of course there ought to be Magnatunes and Scoopts for most creative formats and genres that use copyright. This is certainly part of the plan. It takes time to build infrastructure, especially decentralized infrastructure, but much more will be visible in this area in the coming months.

It must also be mentioned that selling copies or commercial rights are not the only business strategies available to creators, nor even how most creators get paid now, let alone in the future. This was a hot topic of conversation at CopyCamp, so I did a “Speed Geek” session on it — rapid fire five minute presentations repeated for small groups until all attendees had seen all presentations — an exhausting and fun hour plus. My flip chart after the Speed Geek finished:

By me, BY for you.

Google Summer of Code Mentors Summit

Jon Phillips, October 20th, 2006

I participated in Google’s excellent Summer of Code Mentor Summit last weekend and must send yet another big thank you across the blogosphere to Google for their support of our three successful Summer of Code sponsorships. Overall, last Saturday helped to forge the future of the Summer of Code project and to give everyone time to meet and informally form the future of Open Source.

Also, to all developers out there, the Creative Commons Developer Community still has many Developer Challenges still. It is never too late to jump into helping out because it is pretty much proven now that dedicated Open Source developers get rewarded in multiple ways.

Your house on restrictive copyright

Mike Linksvayer, October 20th, 2006

Matt Haughey, who was Creative Commons’ first designer, writes about an annoying encounter with copyright paranoia in a distinctly non-digital field:

Last year I moved into a new house with a big backyard, but the yard faces directly south, so it bakes in the summertime. I decided to find a local architect to help build a small shade patio off the back, and in the process I learned a lot about how far-reaching copyright law hits everyday people.

Read on…

In addition to keeping homeowners from plans, in the future rulers and other measuring devices should be DRM-endisabled so that plans may not be reverse engineered, otherwise architects will have no incentive to design new houses! Right?

Numly and RegisteredCommons

Mike Linksvayer, October 19th, 2006

A class of services that complements and builds upon the CC infrastructure includes assurance, provenance, registration, and warranty. Numly and RegisteredCommons are two currently pioneering organizations in this space.

Chris Matthieu of Numly started a descrption and comparison table for the space on the CC wiki. People from RegisteredCommons have added. Other experts or those merely interested are encouraged to contribute as well.

See a Numly record for Chris’ original description of Numly on the CC Wiki and a record on RegisteredCommons.

Both projects have or are working on search, Firefox integration, WordPress integration … the whole Web 2.0 bag of tricks. “Copyright 2.0″ is what Chris Matthieu calls it.

iCommons did a Q&A with RegisteredCommons last month.