Mega Collaboration at ccMixter

Victor Stone, January 16th, 2007

In yet another example of our community taking the lead, over 20 ccMixter musicians over the course of eight months and hundreds of emails (including two viruses that wiped out the project each time forcing two re-starts) all under the watchful eye of cdk have unleashed Mega Collaboration - Welcome to Mixter. But the story wouldn’t mean much if the results didn’t pan out. Clocking in at over 13 minutes (!) the result could easily have come from any DJ Spooky album. At times experimental at times funky but never losing it’s emotional, soulful edge cdk and friends paint a vivid emotional landscape through instrumentation, textures and beats that will not be soon forgotten.

Pump Audio — now with CC licensing!

Eric Steuer, January 16th, 2007

Pump Audio is a really cool company that works with independent musicians to get their music licensed in commercial media projects. You simply submit your work to Pump, and if they can find someone who wants to use it in their project, Pump will handle the arrangements and pay you 50% of the resulting licensing fees and/or royalties.

What a smart idea! Music supervisors in need of a high volume of quality, reasonably-priced music now have a terrific one-stop shop to turn to when scoring their projects. (Pump’s customers include companies like MTV, NBC, HBO, New Line Cinema, and Saatchi & Saatchi.) By facilitating connections between mainstream media and individual creators, Pump has created a marketplace where anyone in the world with talent can easily sell her or his creativity — without a formal relationship with a record label or other traditional music company. Best yet, Pump’s deals are totally non-exclusive, meaning that you’re free to take advantage of any other opportunity that comes your way.

Wow, Pump really gets it. Which is why we couldn’t be happier to announce that they’re now offering a variety of Creative Commons license options on their site for musicians who want to allow various forms of non-commercial use of their work. You can read more about this cool development in the press release we sent out announcing the collaboration.

Dpop - new CC-licensed Spanish music portal

Eric Steuer, January 16th, 2007

Check out dpop, a cool new music portal featuring CC-licensed podcasts and songs by Spanish pop groups. The site is really easy to navigate and features lots of great mp3 downloads from acts working in various styles of rock and electronic music.

From dpop’s site:

dpop is an independent platform to promote spanish artists supporting free culture, and licensing their pop creations under a Creative Commons license or any copyleft license.

Thanks, Ignasi!

Jamendo artists’ revenue share

Mike Linksvayer, January 15th, 2007

Jamendo (an innovative music community site using CC licenses) has launched its advertising revenue sharing program with artists. The picture below explains the deal. Click on it for an explainer.

See last month’s post on Jamendo reaching 2000 albums and adding new features. Congratulations once again to the Jamendo team!

Digg!

Free Culture @ NYU is Taking Action on Open Access

Melissa Reeder, January 11th, 2007

Apparently January is open access month for NYU’s Free Culture organization. They are holding two events within the next two weeks dedicated to open access.

Saturday Jan. 13, 2007  12-5pm

Freeculture.org is holding their “Taking Action on Open Access” event in NYC where they will be tackling the issue of how to advocate for open access on university campuses. The event is free and open to the public.
The event will be interactive, with presentations from influential professionals working in the Open Access world followed by smaller working groups.
RSVP to oa [at] freeculturenyu.org or via their facebook event post.

Saturday Jan. 19, 2007  5-7pm

Cory Doctorow will be speaking on “State of the Copyfight 2007: Looking up, not out of the woods yet” at the Courant Institute in Room 109. The presentation is free and open to the public and is brought to you by Free Culture @ NYU and NYU ACM.

CC Netherlands CD+DVD release

Mike Linksvayer, January 11th, 2007

CC Netherlands released an all-CC CD+DVD today. Bjorn Wijers writes:

Creative Commons Netherlands has released the physical cd/dvd with musical and visual talent from the Lowlands. I’ve been one of the people behind this project and I can assure you this was one of my most difficult projects I’ve ever done. Although we’ve made some mistakes and had some setbacks, I’m more than happy with the outcome. I wasn’t the only one working on this off course. It certainly could not have been done without the help of various people:

Thanks to Marco Raaphorst for the excellent mastering (although I forgot to mention this on the package, sorry Marco!!!!), thanks Guno and Sander for helping us with the difficult task of picking a mere thirteen songs from more than a 130(!) songs sent in by more than 50(!) different artists. Thanks to Paul Keller and Syb Groeneveld (public projectleaders of Creative Commons Netherlands) for making this project a reality, thanks to JobJorisenMarieke for doing a great job with the graphical and dvd design, thanks to Tapes for an excellent printing and pressing job and last but not least thanks to all the participating creatives on this cd/dvd! Without your work there wasn’t a cd/dvd!

The story was picked up by Nu.nl, one of the most popular Dutch news sites. Congratulations to CC-NL!

Another Reason for Opening Access to Research

Mia Garlick, January 11th, 2007

Open access journal — the British Medical Journal — recently published an article by John Wilbanks, the Executive Director of one of CC’s projects: Science Commons. While much has been written about open access and it represents a welcome and increasing trend in scientific and academic publishing, John’s article provides a timely focus on how Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web can practically ensure that access is open and we reap the full benefits of it, after the legal barriers have been removed.

Build, buy, or assemble?

Mike Linksvayer, January 10th, 2007

Optaros has published a guide to “enterprise ready” open source software under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Linux Weekly News reports:

Opteros has announced the release of an “Open Source Catalog,” designed to help companies decide which projects are “enterprise ready.” Actually downloading the report requires registration, but it’s under a Creative
Commons license, so we’ve made a copy available [PDF].

There are many guides and catalogs for open source business software online and doubtless there are things to quibble with about Optaros’ take, but having a fairly comprehensive catalog in a nice looking 45 page PDF may come in handy at IT departments worldwide. Handier still, the CC license allows customization so long as credit is given to Optaros.

Incidentally, Optaros’ home page says:

Build vs. BuyAssemble? Optaros offers a third alternative to the “build versus buy” decision with our proven application assembly methodology (OptAM).

Take the marketing lingo with a grain of salt, but it’s interesting to translate the metaphor to media: Work for hire vs. negotiate licenses? [Re]using CC licensed content offers a third alternative.

Taipei To Hold “Open & Free” Workshop on Jan. 10

Mike Linksvayer, January 8th, 2007

After several months of planning by Creative Commons Taiwan, the international workshop “Open & Free: New Enterprise in The Information Age” will take place in Taipei on Janurary 10. 2007. The workshop program includes one keynote speech by Creative Commons board member James Boyle, four seminar sessions (Culture, Science, Collaboration, and Creativity), and two open discussion sessions. The workshop will be web-casted starting at 9 am local time (UTC+8).

“The issues of commons, about how people organize themselves in creating and sharing resources together, have never been more relevant than today,” said Tyng-Ruey Chuang, the public lead of Creative Commons Taiwan. “This workshop aims to bring together experts and stake-holders abroad and at home to disseminate the ideals, practices, and challenges of digital commons in this information age.” It is hoped that by sharing the vision and experience about the commons, he said, we will better understand the issues at hand and will further participate in the new enterprise.

The workshop will open with James Boyle’s keynote on “Distributed Creativity and the Logic of Control”, and is followed by presentations from Ronaldo Lemos (FGV Brazil and Creative Commons Brazil) and Ming-Chorng Hwang (Academia Sinica, Taiwan) in the Culture session. It then continues with talks from Science Commons’ Thinh Nguyen and Academia Sinica’s Kwang-tsao Shao in the Science session.

In the afternoon, the Collaboration jam session will showcase, among others, TaiwanBaseballWiki and the Open Content Library. Developers Jon Phillips (Creative Commons) and Jedi Lin (Creative Commons Taiwan) will initiate a dialog with the session speakers and workshop participants on commons-based collaborative development. In the Creativity session, renowned creators — artists, musicians, and legal scholars — will lead a discussion on how the laws are shaping the conditions of artistic creations.

An open discussion session will conclude the workshop with Catharina Maracke (Creative Commons International), Ronaldo Lemos, and Tyng-Ruey Chuang inviting the workshop participants to share their thoughts about Creative Commons’ jurisdiction projects and the broader trans-border free culture movement.

The workshop is sponsored by the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan — the host of Creative Commons Taiwan — and is supported by a grant from Taiwan’s National Science Council. The workshop proceedings can be freely downloaded from Creative Commons Taiwan’s web site.

Public Library of Science at Net Tuesday in San Francisco

Mike Linksvayer, January 4th, 2007

CC Salon San Francisco is going bi-monthly. The next Salon will be in February featuring speakers from Flickr and BitTorrent.

There’s a close substitute in January. Check out NetSquared’s Net Tuesday featuring the Public Library of Science, Tuesday, January 9 from 6-8PM at Citizen Space, 425 Second St., #300 in San Francisco:

This month our two presenters will be from PLoS, The Public Library of Science. PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. PLoS is both an open-access advocate and an online publisher that publishes several peer-reviewed biomedical journals under the Creative Commons Attribution License. PLoS collaborates with Topaz in the development of open-source software to facilitate community-based annotation of scientific articles.

Addendum 2006-01-16: Presentation slides, audio, and an accompanying interview are now available.