Teach: CC invites you to a special screening

Alex Roberts, February 14th, 2006

Elisabeth Shue and Creative Commons

invite you and a guest to a very special screening and celebration of the newly Creative Commons licensed film

Teach

by Davis Guggenheim

Presented in association with the Teachers Documentary Project

Friday, February 17, 2006

6 p.m. screening in the Rainbow Room Followed by a cocktail reception

The San Francisco LGBT Community Center

1800 Market Street, San Francisco

Seating is limited so please respond with acceptances only to: Anne N. Marino, CC Development Director, at 415-946-3068 or anne@creativecommons.org

Photo used under CC-BY license, http://www.flickr.com/photos/lainmoon/31172906/

Looking to Extend Your ‘Real Life’ Free Culture Activities?

Mia Garlick, February 13th, 2006

Check out our new Feature on the Free Culture (”FC”) events and activities that are currently happening in Second Life and learn more about how you can become involved in some ‘in world’ CC & FC events…

V-Fib: Free CC-licensed music compilations

Eric Steuer, February 10th, 2006

V-fib Recordings offers free CC-licensed compilations of underexposed music, from both the past and present. The Winter 2006 mix features great tracks from bands like Koester, A Don Piper Situation, and Rank Strangers. Check it out!

Free Culture doc short

Mike Linksvayer, February 9th, 2006

Maggie Hennefeld and Thessaly La Force filmed a short documentary at last month’s NYC Free Culture Summit. The short, available for download from the Internet Archive under a CC Attribution 2.5 License, features among others
“retired activist and full time novelist” Cory Doctorow, CC staffers
Francesca Rodriquez and
Eric Steuer, and former CC intern
Fred Benenson letting people on the street know about free culture.

The Free Culture NYU blog has more.

jamendo featured on French TV

Eric Steuer, February 9th, 2006

Sylvain Zimmer, founder and CTO of the awesome CC music site jamendo, reports on his blog that this past weekend, French television station TF1 ran a profile on jamendo, focusing on the artists who use the system, as well as the company’s use of Creative Commons licenses. It’s estimated that more than 10 million people saw the program. Congrats, jamendo!

World’s largest protein database under CC BY-ND

Mike Linksvayer, February 9th, 2006

UniProt, the world’s largest protein database, is now available under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Please see Science Commons’ database licensing FAQ concerning which elements of the database are under copyright and which are not.

The UniProt background page explains what the database is all about:

Protein sequence databases have become a crucial resource for molecular biologists, both as repositories for protein functional and structural data and as starting points for future experiments. The UniProt consortium aims to support biological research by maintaining a high quality database that serves as a stable, comprehensive, fully classified, richly and accurately annotated protein sequence knowledgebase, with extensive cross-references and querying interfaces freely accessible to the scientific community.

The Streaming Suitcase

Eric Steuer, February 9th, 2006

The Streaming Suitcase is a brand new site developed by Adam Hyde, where you can find CC-licensed manuals on a variety of technical topics. Learn how to stream media over the internet, study Linux basics, or even build your own mini FM transmitter. The whole site is great, but one thing that especially struck us was Adam’s great illustration of his business model:

In part this is an experiment in developing a model for the sustainable development of professional online documentation and manuals released under Creative Commons. So if you need a manual to be written on streaming and associated topics, and you have a commissioning budget then write to me and I will write one. This means you get a manual, I get some cash to support my nomadic artist life, and others benefit from having a nice manual too.

Thanks to Paul Keller for the heads-up.

Post Ya ‘Pellas

Mike Linksvayer, February 8th, 2006

Victor Stone just turned on a very interesting beta statistics page for our music remix site, ccMixter. Some stuff to note:

• 81% of uploaded a cappella tracks have been remixed (and Victor says that percentage goes way up if you ignore recently uploaded tracks, which remixers haven’t had much time to work with yet).
• J.Lang, ASHWAN, Pat Chilla the Beat Gorilla and fourstones are all on both the most sampled artists and top remixer list. Mixversations happen here.
• teru is the remixer champion and Lisa DeBenedictis the lead vocalist.
• Uploads and signups vary depending where we are in a contest cycle.

More traditional “charts” are coming. In the meantime listen to Ms. Vybe: Post ya ‘pellas at ccMixter and you just might get a remixer.

Your textures in a movie

Mike Linksvayer, February 6th, 2006

Orange is an animated film project in the making to be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license, made with Blender, open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback.

The producers have put out a call for textures. If you’re a computer artist, accept the challenge. Rotten fish textures sound harder to me than grunge maps, but I’m no computer artist.

Thanks to Rob Myers for the pointer.

Linus Torvalds on CC and DRM

Mike Linksvayer, February 6th, 2006

Noted many places, Linux creator Linux Torvalds has written on using CC to marginalize DRM:

Creative Commons licenses already require that you can’t
use technological measures to restrict the rigts you give with the CC
licenses. The “Share Alike” license in particular requires all work based
on it to also be shared alike, ie it has the “GPL feel” to it.

If enough interesting content is licensed that way, DRM eventually becomes
marginalized. Yes, it takes decades, but that’s really no different at all
from how the GPL works. The GPL has taken decades, and it hasn’t
“marginalized” commercial proprietary software yet, but it’s gotten to the
point where fewer people at least worry about it.

Emphasis added. This is embedded in a debate about a future version of the GPL, the dominant free software license. Regardless of how you feel about this debate (or know of its existence), your mission is clear: create and discover great CC-licensed content.