OpenOffice.org Addin Updated

Nathan Yergler, November 19th, 2007

The response to the release of our OpenOffice.org Addin last week was great. We had several bug reports, and lots of constructive feedback. I’ve just released an update, version 0.6.1 (download, changes). This version fixes a couple of bugs which caused OpenOffice.org to crash, as well as storing the license metadata in a more logical place within the document. See the wiki page for details on how to upgrade automatically from within OpenOffice.org.

UK: Open Rights Group @ 2

Mike Linksvayer, November 19th, 2007

Open Rights Group is two years old, and they’ve published a great report on their activities, which includes promoting and educating the public about CC licensing and researching free culture business models. And everything they publish is licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike.

Congratulations to ORG and best wishes for 2008!

The 50,000 friends challenge

Melissa Reeder, November 19th, 2007

Looking for another way to support CC? Be our friend! By connecting with Creative Commons on sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr, you can help us broaden our reach and educate the masses about the Creative Commons mission.

So, starting today, we’re issuing a 50,000 friend challenge to our community. We’re asking you to help us expand CC’s overall friend network to 50,000 people across the Web’s various social networking and content sharing sites by December 15 – the date of our fifth birthday party.

Here are some ways you can help our friend network grow. If you aren’t a member of any of these sites, please help us by starting (or expanding) a CC group on any site you do use.

• Join our Facebook Cause, become a top recruiter, or become a CC Fan
• Participate in the 2007 CC Swag photo contest on Flickr
• Become a Creative Commons friend on MySpace or Friendster

Of course, you can also help Creative Commons by contributing to our annual fundraising campaign. As always, we thank you sincerely for your support!

CC swag photo contest winner #1

Melissa Reeder, November 19th, 2007

And the first weekly winner of the CC swag photo contest is…

Photo by Mortenjohs CC BY

Thank you Mortenjohs and the other 20 participants for your participation and support! There are 4 weeks remaining in the 2007 CC swag photo contest. We’re hoping for 100 entries - so grab your camera, CC swag and get started! If you need new CC swag, please check out the CC store or donate to the 2007 annual fundraising campaign.

ccMixter: The Next Step

Mike Linksvayer, November 19th, 2007

We’re thinking about how to take our music remix site, ccMixter, to the next level. Read about it at the Lessig blog. If you’re logged into ccMixter, you can go here to take a survey on the matter.

If you’re unfamiliar with ccMixter, check out the unofficial ccMixterblog, which has tons of great examples of ccMixter reuse and collaboration, and some well-deserved self-congratulation (or go straight to the Editor’s Picks).

An affordance that keeps the ccMixter community focused is that no fully-mixed uploads are allowed, unless they reuse material already on ccMixter.

Now for the (post) title cut: The Next Step by Trifonic, licensed under CC BY-NC.

Anepsosis Uses CC for MMMORPG Character Art

Cameron Parkins, November 16th, 2007

Anepsosis, an open-source 3D MMORPG, has recentlly decided to release all of their game art (which includes texts, pictures, sketches, drawings, 3D art, and sounds) under a CC BY-SA license. This allows all the content created by the Anepsosis community, not just the final game, to remain open and free, adding additional functionality to the already open-source project (Anepsosis is being released under the GNU GPL Version 2).

Report on CC and UK cultural heritage institutions

Mike Linksvayer, November 16th, 2007

A report based on the survey we mentioned in August is now released:

The cultural heritage community sits on a goldmine of images, texts, sounds, films, video, data and metadata of immense interest to wide variety of specific sectors and the general public. The resources that these organisations hold increasingly come as digital files and objects: either ‘born digital’ or older works freshly reformed for the media and formats of the internet age. The digital resources produced by the cultural heritage community – and often funded by the public purse – form a set of highly valued and trusted materials particularly desired by the research and education sectors, and general public. This community, especially those partaking of public funds, faces pressure to place their digital resources online and to make them available to the research and education sectors.

Lawrence Lessig in xcd and on Boing Boing TV

Cameron Parkins, November 16th, 2007

In case you hadn’t heard, Lawrence Lessig is officially the most popular guy on the internet (for now)! Check out webcomic xkcd for a great strip featuring Elaine, the “greatest hacker of our era”, learning copyright from CC’s CEO. For added enjoyment, check out a wonderfully lo-fi tribute by SweedishViennese “art-pranksters” Monochrom on BoingBoingTV. That means he’s cool.

Making and marking public resources as such

Mike Linksvayer, November 16th, 2007

Works by the U.S. government are in the public domain, but not necessarily accessible to the public. Carl Malamud’s public.resource.org has heroically worked to rectify this, and recently announced that 1.8 million pages of federal case law, including all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 to the present and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754 would be made available next year:

“The U.S. judiciary has allowed their entire work product to be locked up behind a cash register,” said Carl Malamud, CEO of Public.Resource.Org. “Law is the operating system of our society and today’s agreement means anybody can read the source for a substantial amount of case law that was previously unavailable.”

…

The cases will be marked with a new Creative Commons mark—CC-Ø—that signals that there are no copyrights or other related rights attached to the content.

CC since its inception has provided a public domain dedication or certification deed and metadata. CC-Ø will extend this functionality, taking into account what we have learned over the past five years. This will be a big project, watch for further news!

CC+ Video

Cameron Parkins, November 16th, 2007

There has been quite a lively exchange of emails on our community discussion list concerning the idea of CC+ that CC CEO Lawrence Lessig mentioned on our blog a little over a month ago. To shed some light on the concept, we posted a new video that explains CC+ more fully. In short, CC+ is how CC licenses can work in tandem with commercial arrangements. 

The core of this idea is based around the non-exclusivity of our licence suite. While you may use a specific CC-license for the wide distribution of your work, there is nothing prohibiting you from entering into a separate license that allows for uses not offered by the CC license (for example, working out a one off deal that would allow for commercial use of a CC BY-NC work).

So go ahead, check it out, and let us know what you think (and don’t forget that we have other videos up as well).