ccPublisher 2.0.3 Bug Fix Release

Nathan Yergler, May 26th, 2006

Last week we shipped ccPublisher 2 and as with all major updates, there were bound to be bugs. Fortunately users have been allowing the automated crash reporter to send (non-personal, non-identifying) information to the ccPublisher Issue Tracker, which has allowed us to work on fixing bugs people are encountering. I’ve just uploaded ccPublisher 2.0.3. This release fixes a handful of bugs which were reported several times by users. It will be of particular interest to users who experienced crashes when using international characters in the metadata fields. I encourage all users to download and install the upgrade.

Download information and a list of bugs fixed is available on the release page.

Netsquared

Mike Linksvayer, May 26th, 2006

At the Netsquared conference “remixing the web for social change” Tuesday I’ll be on a panel with the EFF’s Jason Schultz and immoderated by Tara Hunt on Turning Communications Technologies Into Tools For Free Speech And Free Culture.

Those not attending can participate by commenting on the session page or via chat.

Update 2006-06-01: Slides and chat transcript. Thanks to everyone who attended the conference session or the chat. Lots of great questions asked and contacts made.

Diventa Creativo

Mike Linksvayer, May 26th, 2006

There’s now an Italian version of the introduction to Creative Commons animation Get Creative — Diventa Creativo, available in several formats with sources for remixing!

Summer of Code 2006 Projects Announced

Nathan Yergler, May 25th, 2006

As previously mentioned, Creative Commons is participating in this year’s Google Summer of Code. Creative Commons was awarded four project slots by Google, and the selecting the top four was challenging. We received many, many excellent proposals, and I personally want to thank everyone who took the time to think about a project and submit it. The projects we’ll be working with students on this summer are:

• Adding EXIF embedding and Flickr upload support to ccPublisher, Robert Litzke
• Adding support for uploading to ccHost from ccPublisher, Bruno Luís Gonçalves Dilly
• Creating a Banshee extension to support embedded licenses, Luke Hoersten
• Updating MozCC to support RDFa, Landan Hicks

We’re very excited to see what this summer’s projects will produce. And if you have some free time this summer, there are still plenty of ideas for projects that would help the Commons.

Crammed Discs Remix Contest ends today: Get your entries in!

Eric Steuer, May 24th, 2006

There’s been a ton of action over at the Crammed Discs Remix Contest on ccMixter. Just a reminder: the competition ends today, so submit your tracks now! Don’t forget, nine winning remixes will appear on a Crammed Discs remix compilation, to be sold online through digital music stores.

Diesel-U-Music: Featured Tracks posted online

Eric Steuer, May 23rd, 2006

The Diesel-U-Music international music competition (see our previous blog post) is now well underway, with more than 1,200 CC-licensed songs submitted. Diesel’s staff has started featuring selected music for download on the contest site — check out some of the latest picks on the Featured Tracks page.

ccPublisher 2.0 Released

Nathan Yergler, May 19th, 2006

I’m pleased to announce the release of ccPublisher 2. ccPublisher is
an application which allows users to select licenses for their work and
publish them to the Internet Archive for permanent,
free hosting. Files in supported formats will have license information
embedded in them. If you’re more into hosting your work yourself, ccPublisher will generate some HTML for you that lets others validate the license it embeds in the file.

While this release doesn’t sport lots of new end user features, it does
have a nifty new under-the-hood architecture which will allow other
developers to more easily contribute to the application. It also
features a much improved uploading module for more robust uploads to the
Internet Archive.

As always, feedback, suggestions and bug reports are welcome and encouraged. See
the release page for Windows and Linux downloads. Mac OS X downloads will be available Monday, 22 May, 2006.

Update: Shortly after this announcement a few relatively wide-spread bugs were reported through the crash reportor. For that reason, release 2.0.2 is now available. Updated downloads available at the link above. Thanks to everyone who clicks “OK” when asked to send a crash report.

Update: Mac OS X downloads are now available from the release page.

Pearl Jam’s “Life Wasted” video released under a CC license

Eric Steuer, May 19th, 2006

The new music video for Pearl Jam’s “Life Wasted” was released today under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs license, so that people anywhere can legally copy, distribute, and share the clip. This is the first Pearl Jam video to be released in eight years and, as far as we know, the first video produced by a major label ever to be CC-licensed. Pearl Jam and J Records are offering the video as a free download at Google Video from today, May 19th, through May 24th. After May 24th, the clip will be made available for sale. For more information, check out PearlJam.com and CC’s press release.

Ryuichi Sakamoto: stop-rokkasho.org

Eric Steuer, May 19th, 2006

Esteemed composer and musician Ryuichi Sakamoto has launched stop-rokkasho.org in response to the opening of a nuclear reprocessing plant in the Japanese village of Rokkasho. To lead off an international awareness campaign, Sakamoto wrote and recorded a track called “Rokkasho,” featuring rapper Shing02 and guitarist/producer Christian Fennesz, under the group name Team 6. The vocal and instrumental tracks have been made available under the Creative Commons NonCommercial Sampling Plus license, so that people can remix, sample, and remodel the track.

Dream at 1920×1080 in CC

Mike Linksvayer, May 19th, 2006

Elephants Dream, a short film that premiered late March, is now available for download in many formats, including a stunning AVI, MPEG4 (mp42) / AC3 5.1 Surround / HD 1920×1080 encoding. The production files are also downloadable. 

The film is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license. It was created to show off the capabilities of open source 3D modeling software Blender, a task at which it has surely succeeded.