Creative Commons @ Open Source Pavilion @ Siggraph this week in Boston

Jon Phillips, August 3rd, 2006

Creative Commons is represented this
week as part of the first ever Open Source Pavilion, which features Open Source Applications, at the world’s largest Graphic Conference, Siggraph. The booth this year is set-up by Ton Rosendaal,
the project lead of the CC-BY 2.5 licensed Elephant’s Dream Open Source movie and Blender, a 3D application. There is participation around the projects Blender, GNOME, Gimp, Creative Commons, Jahshaka, Uni-verse, Inkscape, and several others.

Please stop by booth #1527 all week to discuss Creative Commons licensing, how
you can plug into development, and other information about the Commons. Here is a link for free tickets to the exhibition floor. Also, you can check the Blender website for a day-by-day overview of the conference with pictures, video, and other information.

This conference participation comes on the heals of the previous week’s
Desktop Developer Conference in Ottawa, Canada, where Jon Phillips (myself)
presented “May I See Your License?” which looked at licensing creative works, how to participate in the Creative Commons Developer Community, and the various software CC develops to support licensing.

Also, please attend the upcoming Linux World Expo in San Francisco August 14-17 and don’t forget that there is a CC Salon next wednesday from 6-9 PM.

UPDATE: Please track the next CC Salon on our post at upcoming.org. The event next week features Public Library of Science, Magnatune’s John Buckman, and the popular social bookmarking site, Digg. Come on out for a fun evening of conversation, drinks and networking.

New CC search UI

Mike Linksvayer, August 2nd, 2006

Today we turned on a new search interface offering tabbed access to Yahoo! and Google CC-enabled web searches and Flickr CC image search.

We hope that this new search user interface highlights the ease of discovering licensed content (including options to filter for only content that allows commercial or derivative use) and opportunities to do more.

How to access the new CC search interface:

• Vist http://search.creativecommons.org.
• From the Creative Commons home page click on the “Find” image.
• Get Firefox and select CC from the Firefox search bar.

What’s next?

Our first priority is to internationalize the search interface. Fortunately we have tools in place to tackle this.

We’ll add more search tabs as quality CC-enabled search engines come online. We’re especially eager to see audio- and video-specific search with the same features offered by Yahoo!, Google, and Flickr CC search.

Credit goes to our designer Alex Roberts for another marvelous design and implementation. The main creativecommons.org site is up next!

11,384 roses?

Talking about CC in 15 languages

Mike Linksvayer, August 1st, 2006

Check out Estudio Livre’s iSummit 2006 podcasts: currently 24 people in 15 languages talking about sharing and collaboration with Creative Commons, with video to come.

The clips are all free to be remixed under the Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Best open source solution!?

Mike Linksvayer, August 1st, 2006

ccHost, the Remix Management System (think CMS, heh) that powers ccMixter and that we’ve released under the GPL, has been nominated for the Linux Journal and IDG World Expo Product Excellence Awards and LinuxWorld San Francisco in the “best open source solution” category. We hardly expect to win, but thanks for the nomination!

If you’re coming to LinuxWorld Expo (August 14-17) please visit the Creative Commons booth in the .org Pavilion and get inspired by Lawrence Lessig’s keynote, Free Culture: What We Need From You.

Free exhibit hall passes include access to keynotes.

Bram de Jong of Freesound

Mike Linksvayer, August 1st, 2006

New featured commoner interview: Bram de Jong of Freesound. Here’s the first sentence of one of his answers to whet your appetite and prime your ears:

Oh, yeah, entirely! Some of the people in Freesound are so dedicated to recording and creating sounds it’s amazing.

Read the interview.

“Abracadabra!” - Free CC-licensed e-book about the Beatles’ “Revolver”

Eric Steuer, August 1st, 2006

Abracadabra! by Ray Newman is a new e-book that tells the story behind the making of the Beatles’ masterpiece, the 1966 album Revolver. The book is available for free download and is being offered to the world under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license. Newman says that he plans to publish an expanded second edition of the book next year, and is inviting the public to help.

My aim is to produce a free, good quality history of the making of Revolver which doesn’t (a) rely entirely on regurgitating chunks of other books or (b) unsubstaniated opinion. This has made the job harder than it might have been, but also a lot more fun.

(via Boing Boing)

Robberriff remix contest extended to August 20

Eric Steuer, August 1st, 2006

Due to popular demand, the deadline for the Robberriff Remix Contest (previously discussed here) is being extended to August 20. Fake Science will choose the top 20 remixes and post them online for people to vote on. The creator of the highest-ranked track will win an iPod nano. Check out Robberriff’s MySpace page to listen to more of his music.

WpLicense 0.7.0: Now with Widget support

Nathan Yergler, August 1st, 2006

The folks over at Automattic, who are also some of the brains behind the WordPress blogging system, have developed Widgets for Wordpress. Widgets are a way for users to easily customize their blog’s look and feel without dropping into HTML or PHP. WpLicense 0.7.0 has been released, and includes support for rendering your selected license as a widget. Full details, along with download links, are in the wiki, naturally.

Now if only Wordpress.com would support WpLicense for their hosted blogs, even more happy WordPress users could be happy contributors to the Commons.