Tonight in NYC: Creative Commons concert w/ Diplo, Girl Talk, Peeping Tom!

Eric Steuer, September 29th, 2006

There are still a few tickets left!

Please join us tonight at Irving Plaza for a Creative Commons concert presented by WIRED and Flavorpill. The show will feature Mike Patton’s experimental pop supergroup Peeping Tom, DJ/producer Diplo, and mash-up/remix artist Girl Talk. Creative Commons’ CEO Lawrence Lessig will be on hand to introduce the artists.

This concert is a great way to show your support for our work, as proceeds from all ticket sales will go directly to Creative Commons (please note that ticket price is *not* tax-deductible).

Bay Area: Brian Walsh benefit party at Shine (9/29)

Eric Steuer, September 27th, 2006

The good folks at Shine, where Creative Commons holds its San Francisco CC Salon events, are holding a benefit party this Friday (9/29) for Brian Walsh, who is the man behind Shine’s super cool Flickr photo booth (now with CC licensing!) Brian’s house was broken into recently and some of his equipment was stolen — his friends are trying to raise enough money to get him back in business. More info on the Shine blog.

So come by this Friday anytime after 6 pm, we’ve got more and more people coming to spin and help out, and all the proceeds are going straight to Brian so he can get a new laptop and get back to work!

Revver: the relaunch

Eric Steuer, September 26th, 2006

If you’re not already familiar with Revver, it’s a really slick video publishing platform that uses Creative Commons licenses to support its business model of “free and unlimited sharing.” Revver attaches a short ad to the end of your video and tracks how many times your clip has been viewed. The company then splits ad revenue with content creators as videos spread virally. It makes a lot of sense for Revver to use CC licenses and to promote sharing, since the whole point is to get as many people as possible to see the videos. (The more people that watch them, the more ads are viewed, and so forth.)

Last week, Revver launched a new version of its site, and it looks great. Updates include a new dashboard page, a secure Flash player, a Web-based uploader, and a feature where you can build collections of other people’s videos that you’re interested (somewhat like Flickr’s “Favorites” feature). Check out these blog posts by Micki Krimmel, Revver’s Director of Community, for more information about the new Revver.

Speaking of Micki, she’ll be giving a presentation about Revver at the next CC Salon San Francisco, happening on Wednesday, October 11. David Pescowitz (Make, Boing Boing) and Ryan Junell (Webzine, Sagan, SLOMO Video, and more will also be presenting. More information coming soon!

Bay Area: Revision3 launch event tonight (9/26)

Eric Steuer, September 26th, 2006

Revision3 is a cool new Internet TV company from the founders of digg. They’re using Creative Commons licenses for their content and generally promoting the idea of sharing. Tonight, Revision3 is hosting a free launch event in San Francisco at Mighty. More info about the event is available on Upcoming.org. And here’s some helpful info about Revision3, sent to us by the company:

Instead of locking down repurposed shows online like most mainstream media, Revision3 develops its own highly original, and entertaining programming directly for the Web, and has adopted a completely neutral stance on distribution. Revision3 shows are currently available with every TiVo box with a podcast feature, will be available on Palm, Inc. devices via the Blazer browser, and on partner web sites such as Apple iTunes, Google Video, YouTube, BitTorrent and DivX.

The revenue comes from Ed Sullivan style product placement where the talent can get jokey with it, and still deliver what advertisers want as far as reaching that coveted niche audience.

First CC-licensed PhD in Sweden

Mike Linksvayer, September 25th, 2006

The first Creative Commons licensed PhD to be defended on 2nd October in
Göteborg, Sweden.

The PhD thesis entitled Disruptive Technology: Effects of Technology
Regulation on Democracy deals with the negative democratic effects
which often arise when attempts are made to regulate the Internet
technology.

By studying the attempts to regulate the disruptive effects of Internet
technology and the consequences of these regulatory attempts on the
IT-based participatory democracy this work shows that the regulation of
technology is the regulation of democracy.

The work has been written by Mathias Klang who is Project Lead for
Creative Commons Sweden.

The PhD thesis is the first of its kind to be released under a Creative
Commons license (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5) in Sweden.

XMP JPEG embedding with PHP

Mike Linksvayer, September 23rd, 2006

A couple weeks ago we announced a Java tool for embedding XMP metadata in PDFs. Now Jon Phillips has taken the pjmt PHP library and wrapped it with simple command line an library methods for embedding XMP metadata in JPEG image files. Obviously this would be useful for integration with web-based photo sites. Get the code from the xmp/jpeg-php module of the cctools subversion repository on sourceforge.

Also see our XMP overview page. As Nathan Yergler wrote a few days ago, this code is partially inspired by our Google Summer of Code experience.

Remix culture: example and education

Mike Linksvayer, September 21st, 2006

Uwe Hermann points to a cool reuse of one of his CC-licensed photos and video of Lawrence Lessig’s Wizards of OS 4 keynote.

Related:

• Video of Lessig’s LinuxWorld keynote available
• Previous mention of Uwe Hermann’s CC podcast
• More Flickr/CC reuse (one of many)

Valleywag: Record companies, it’s finally time for the Creative Commons license

Eric Steuer, September 20th, 2006

Our sentiments exactly!

Practically every online downloading system already comes with a Digital Rights Management lock that limits its use. That same technology could mark music as “pre-approved for performance” — a song that users can play with, dance to, re-record, and post to the Internet with impunity. YouTube could check for a simple key, much easier than whatever magic copyrighted-music-recognizer YouTube has up its sleeve.

Google Summer of Code Wrap-up

Nathan Yergler, September 20th, 2006

This summer Creative Commons had the privilege of participating in the Google Summer of Code. The Summer of Code is an opportunity for students to gain experience working on open source projects with financial support from Google. Participating projects provide mentoring to the students, and benefit from their efforts through the summer.

Creative Commons had three projects successfully completed this summer. Luke Hoersten worked on CcBanshee, an extension which adds license support to the popular Banshee music player. While Luke’s initial project proposal was to write a simple plugin to handle this functionality, he found that he needed to make architectural changes once he began coding. Luke worked closely with the Banshee community to understand and extend the plugin API, resulting in the addition of a priority scheduler for plugins like CcBanshee to use. Luke also dug in and implemented part of his plugin as a stand-alone C# library which can be used for generic license validation, cc-sharp. Hopefully we’ll see other Mono applications make use of this functionality, building on the great work Luke did this summer.

Bruno Dilly proposed and completed a project which will help bring two of Creative Commons’ software offerings together in a natural evolution. Bruno worked with both ccHost and ccPublisher in order to allow users of ccPublisher to upload works to ccHost installations, including ccMixter. Bruno’s work with two code bases in two languages was impressive, and we think that bridging these two projects adds value to both. Bruno’s ccPublisher work is currently in a branch, and we’ll be shipping it along with, or shortly after ccPublisher 2.4 later this fall.

Rob Litzke also worked on a ccPublisher-related project this summer, developing a plugin to support uploading of images to Flickr. Rob’s work helped point out some deficencies in the current plugin API, which we’re working to address in ccPublisher 2.4 so we can ship his code. Rob also took on the challenge of developing a specification and code for embedding license claims in JPEG files via EXIF metadata. While this part of the project wasn’t as successful as the Flickr plugin, it did lead to a broader discussion of the role of embedded metadata, and the consideration of XMP as a preferred, multi-file-format way of embedding license metadata in media.

Thanks to all our students who spent their summer working to improve Creative Commons’ technology, and thanks to Google for their continued support of open source software. If you’re interested in working on a CC technology project, we have plenty of ideas; we’d love to hear from you.

Tomorrow night at the NYPL: Architecture for Humanity

Eric Steuer, September 19th, 2006

New Yorkers, there’s a terrific event happening tomorrow night in your neck of the woods: Live from the NYPL presents a panel with Cameron Sinclair, Kate Stohr and Cynthia Barton of Architecture for Humanity (which we profiled as a Featured Commoner here) at the NYPL. John Hockenberry is moderating the discussion which will address how contemporary designers and architects are using their talents to respond to the world’s humanitarian crises.

As we enter the 21st century the field of architecture is at a crossroads. From Hurricane Katrina to the war in Iraq, large-scale urbanization, disaster and conflict has destabilized not only our political structures but also the built environment prompting many to question the building practices of the past. Is the role of the architect to create the signature monuments that define and exalt our cultural and economic values? Or, is there an alternative path to building in the world today, one that engages people where they live and work and recognizes that sustainability is not a luxury but a necessity?

LIVE from the NYPL
CAMERON SINCLAIR, KATE STOHR & CYNTHIA BARTON with John Hockenberry, moderator
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
at 7:00 PM
Celeste Bartos Forum
$15 general admission and $10 library donors, seniors and students with valid identification
Buy tickets