One Big Thank You

Melissa Reeder, January 4th, 2007

As Creative Commons’ CEO Lawrence Lessig noted, we are pleased to announce that we have exceeded our $300,000 fundraising goal for 2006! The support we have received is vital to extending the work that we’ve already begun and initiating new projects that will help grow this vital movement.
We want to take this opportunity to reiterate how much we appreciate all of our communities past support and how excited we are about the future.

We have experienced a phenomenal amount of public support during this campaign. From the number of community members’ creative ways of donating to the Revver initative, Flickr Contest and our 4th Birthday Party, it has been an amazing 4 years. Thank you.

In addition to the success of our campaign, we also had an enormously successful CC Birthday Party celebration, both Internationally and virtually. For this, I would like to give some shout outs to:

All the participating international affiliates including CC Poland, CC Mainland China, CC Netherlands, CC Italy, CC Denmark and CC Portugal.

San Francisco

• Songbird
• Cooley Godward
• Anchor Steam
• Glenn Otis Brown
• all the amazing CC & songbird volunteers

New York

• Eyebeam
• Fred Benenson

Virtual World

• Linden Lab
• Common Cure of BoomToysLabs and partner, In Kenzo, who leads the AMO Studio content development team were responsible for creating the CC torch.
• The Aimee Weber studio designed Larry’s plaque from the CC Board of Directors.

And, most importantly the biggest thanks goes out to the collective “you” for making this the most successful CC Birthday celebration ever.

Watch the pilot episode of WIRED Science online or on TV

Eric Steuer, January 3rd, 2007

WIRED Science is a brand new television pilot from our good friends at Wired. You can watch it online or catch the premiere tonight on PBS. Another CC friend, David Byrne, did the music for the show’s opening.

Watch the Pilot Episode of WIRED Science
Wednesday, January 3, 2007
8:00 PM EST on PBS (Check local listings.)

Go into the world of meteorite hunters, where space, commerce, and art intersect; travel to Yellowstone National Park, to harvest viruses that may hold the key to a technology revolution; and dive underwater to find NEEMO, NASA’s extreme astronaut training program. Meet rocket belt inventors, stem cell explorers, and the developer of an electric car that goes zero-to-60 in under four seconds.

WIRED Science is one of three pilots under consideration by PBS for series development. You can weigh in on your favorite. Viewer feedback, as well as additional audience-based research, will inform PBS’s decision to greenlight one pilot as the next new science series slated to premiere in Fall 2007.

CC Swag Photo Contest Winners

Melissa Reeder, January 3rd, 2007

After much deliberation we here at CC are excited to announce the winners for CC’s 1st annual CC swag photo contest. The winners are Franz Patzig with his photo “CC” and Yamababobo with his photo “CC on Light”. We have been humbled by the number and quality of entries and thank each and every participant for their creative support. We are excited to establish the CC swag photo contest as a new CC tradition.

CC Licenses Make Sense for Gatehouse Media Sites

Mia Garlick, January 2nd, 2007

As Lisa Williams noted her local paper - Watertown TAB - quietly switched over the site to use a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 2.5 license. Dave Weinberger noted that his local paper - the Brookline TAB - did likewise. The reason — GateHouse Media, a newspaper conglomerate that owns 75 daily and 231 weekly newspapers, has applied Creative Commons licenses to the company’s TownOnline sites.

Howard Owens, the director for digital publishing for Gatehouse, explained on the Watertown blog that the decision to opt for a CC license was not a big step for a mainstream media publisher such as Gatehouse because:

“It’s really not a big change from how a lot of newspaper sites handle content — free non-commercial use, but generally only if you ask. This removes the middle man of asking, because now it’s explicitly stated that free non-commercial use is permitted. It’s also way to draw attention to: feel free to redistribute our content in non-commercial ways, please just be sure to link back to the originating site.”

Removing the middleman?? Hmm, sounds similar to something we might say about skipping intermediaries.

Owens continued to to explain more about the move on his own blog and address some of the issues and concerns publishers may have.

There have been other newspapers outside of the US who have adopted CC licensing for parts of their publications. In Italy in July 2006, one of the leading Italian newspapers - La Stampa released its two cultural supplements, TuttoScienze (science) and TuttoLibri (books) under a CC license. In Colombia, the main Colombian paper El Tiempo included a CC license option for its citizen journalism section. And in Portugal, the launch of the CC Portugal licenses was celebrated with the release by one of the largest and most prestigious daily newspapers in Portugal, Público, of articles under a CC license both online and in the paper edition.

Swivel Adopts CC Licensing

Mia Garlick, January 2nd, 2007

Swivel is a site that is all about data. You can upload your data and have it made into graphs, you can find datasets, comment on them or rate them, or you can compare different datasets that have been uploaded to the site. As the site itself explains, it’s “a place where curious people explore data - all kinds of data.” Techcrunch recently featured a helpful article giving an overview of the site and how the data- and graph-curious can get the most out of it.

One of the most viewed graphs featured on the site as of today is entitled “Wine and Violent Crime” to show that “In the last 30 years or so wine consumption and violent crime in the US have been moving in opposite directions. Let’s all get a glass and get less violent.” Another graph shows the battle of the search engines of Time Warner, AOL, Ask, Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft.

Just in time for the holidays, Swivel announced that they had switched over to use Creative Commons licensing, the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license to be exact, in response to user feedback about the site. They have even set up a discussion group to discuss some of the legal issues surrounding data. It’s still in “preview” mode but it already sounds like a data- or copyright-wonks’ dream!

CC Hungary Says Happy New Year with a Remix Album Release

Jon Phillips, January 2nd, 2007

Creative Commons Hungary sent a nice happy new year wish to the Creative Commons community mailing list in the form of the first Hungarian CC licensed music album (all tracks are licensed under CC BY-NC 2.5 Hungary). CC Hungary’s Bodo Balazs says the remix album is made-up of “broken etno, beatbox’n'bass, world noise.” 

The remix websites states:

In 2004 many bands, including the Beastie Boys, David Byrne, and Zap Mama, also released songs under CC licence on the Wired CD.The remix contest was such a hit that we are now trying to repeat this success in Hungary as well. And the jury! A bunch of musicians with international acclaim: DJ Vadim, Szakcsi Lakatos Béla, Mitsou and Dj Palotai!

This is an interesting album that is fusing localized acoustic Hungarian sounds with some electronically mediated cuts and breakbeats. Check it out! 

ADVANCED: If you are using Unix/Linux, you can grab them all at once with this command:

wget -r ftp://ftp.mokk.bme.hu/Audio/nomada/vegleges_mp3/ -l 1