Reminder: CC Salon SF is tonight!

Eric Steuer, February 21st, 2007

Please join us for CC Salon San Francisco, taking place tonight from 7-9pm at Shine (1337 Mission St.). There will be music and presentations by:

* John Wilbanks, Executive Director, Science Commons
* Joi Ito, Web Entrepreneur, Chairman of Creative Commons Board
* Heather Ford, Executive Director, iCommons
* Jim Sowers, Calabash Music and National Geographic, Musical Guest, Discussion of Digital Music

See who’s going to be there on Upcoming.org.

“Open Art” show presented by Florida Free Culture

Mike Linksvayer, February 16th, 2007

About a year after Free Culture @ NYU’s Creative Commons Art Show 2006, Free Culture Florida is putting on Open Art, a Creative Commons art show in the University of Florida’s Reitz Union Gallery.

The show will feature mixed media and prints. Digital versions of the latter may be viewed at the Open Art 2007 Flickr Pool.

Two images to whet your appetite, each licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike. The cognitive dissonance inducing “ccPirate” by Karen Rustad + Nelson Pavlosky:

Pretty “Azaleas” by Colleen Krichharr:

VRM

Mike Linksvayer, February 15th, 2007

Doc Searls and others have been writing about Vendor Relationship Management — infrastructure facilitating relationships where the customer is the vendor’s equal, contra Customer Relationship Management.

Searls’ most recent essay on VRM, Building an Relationship Economy, says that Creative Commons licenses have a role to play:

Let’s ignore the record companies for a minute. Instead, lets look behind them, back up the supply chain, to the first sources of music: the artists. Part of the system we need is already built for these sources, through Creative Commons. By this system, creative sources can choose licenses that specify the freedoms carried by their work, and also specify what can and cannot be done with that work. These licenses are readable by machines as well as by lawyers. That’s a great start on the supply side.

Now let’s look at the same work from the demand side. What can we do — as music lovers, or as customers — to find, use, and even pay for, licensed work? Some mechanisms are there, but nothing yet that is entirely in our control — that reciprocates and engages on the demand side what Creative Commons provides on the supply side.

Yes, we can go to websites, subscribe to music services, use iTunes or other supply-controlled intermediating systems and deal with artists inside those systems. But there still isn’t anything that allows us to deal directly, on our own terms, with artists and their intermediaries. Put another way, we don’t yet have the personal means for establishing relationships with artists.

Although Creative Commons licenses by themselves don’t by themselves enable relationships, we’re very interested in helping to create infrastructure that complements CC licensing and does facilitate relationships between artists and consumers — often one entity is both — and other roles, e.g., commercial user, patron, remixer, tastemaker — the same.

On the technology side we’re exploring protocols and applications that could be among the building blocks for media-oriented VRM. Machine readable licenses have been a hallmark of CC from the beginning. Things we’ve done to build on this vision have included creating tools to visualize and search licensend content, a remix management system that includes a “trackback for remix” API, a protocol for embedding metadata such that the creator can be found even when media files are shared via P2P, CC Labs projects for machine readable attribution and complementary commerce metadata, and specifications for including licensing information in feeds.

How can Creative Commons help fulfill the VRM vision and vice versa? OpenID enabling ccHost and encouraging the many curators and repositories of CC licensed media to adopt advanced metadata and OpenID are no-brainers. (User-controlled identity plays a big role in VRM, and one can easily see it playing a big role in helping creators manage creative assets and creative relationships across many sites, rather than only within individual silos.)

Next week as we refresh our developer challenges leading into the Google Summer of Code 2007 application process, we’ll be keeping these opportunities in mind. VRM thinkers, keep in mind the role CC licenses and technologies can play in VRM and give us feedback.

ccHost 4.0 RC

Victor Stone, February 15th, 2007

Are you thinking about hosting a web site dedicated to the CC remix culture? How about in the next few day?

The official Release Candidate for the award winning ccHost 4.0 is now available (update: RC period is over, thanks to everybody who participated). The code has been running for a few weeks on ccMixter so we are confident of its stability, we just want to make sure we’ve got all the kinks out.

This release marks a major step forward for ccHost with many features you’ve been seeing appear on ccMixter over the last few months: playlists (more), remix radio and publicize all enabled by the query/formatting engine which is now used for feeds, streaming and our sample pool api. Our own embedded MP3 player, a 2-4x performance boost, AJAX Everywhere and dozens more enhancements are hopefully enough to encourage folks into to giving it a try in the next few days and letting us know if you run into problems.

MozCC ♥ Songbird

Nathan Yergler, February 15th, 2007

I’m a bit late, so not-quite-in-time for Valentine’s Day, I’m happy to announce a proverbial match made in heaven: MozCC and Songbird.

You might recall Songbird, the previously mentioned wicked-cool music player built on Mozilla. They’re busy readying their next milestone release, 0.2.5. In anticipation of that release, I’ve just shipped MozCC 2.4.2. MozCC 2.4.22.4.3 is the first release to officially support both Songbird and Firefox 2.

You can find out more about Songbird over at “the nest”; details about installing MozCC are available in the wiki.

UPDATE: Oops! Love is blind. MozCC 2.4.2 had a regression in Firefox support. Check out 2.4.3 instead.

Creative Commons Salon SF Next Wednesday: Joi, John, Heather and Jim

Jon Phillips, February 14th, 2007

Please join us for the first CC Salon of 2007 at ShineSF.com on Wednesday, February 21, from 7-9 PM in San Francisco. It will be major! And, yes, please note, we are not doing this event monthly now, but every other month to maximize the impact in SF!

The line-up for the evening:

• John Wilbanks, Executive Director, Science Commons
• Joi Ito, Web Entrepreneur, Chairman of Creative Commons Board
• Heather Ford, Executive Director, iCommons
• Jim Sowers, Calabash Music and National Geographic, Musical Guest, Discussing state of Digital Music and DJ’ing

Details

The event is free and open to the public. Quick presentations begin at 7 PM and go until 9 PM, but if you’d like to have an informal meeting or get a good seat, get there a bit early (We open the doors at 6 PM). So don’t worry if you’re late; there will be stuff happening all night at Shine, 1337 Mission Street between 9th and 10th Streets. Shine has free wi-fi and a super cool Flickr photo booth. Note: Since Shine is a bar, CC Salon is only open to people who are 21 and older.

Also, plug this event into your digital life on our upcoming.org posting.

About

CC Salon is a free, casual monthly get-together focused on conversation, presentations, and performances from people or groups who are developing projects that relate to open content and/or software. Please invite your friends, colleagues, and anyone you know who might be interested in drinks and discussion. There are now CC Salons happening in San Francisco, Toronto, Berlin, Beijing, Warsaw, Seoul, Brisbane, and Johannesburg. Read about the first Jo’burg salon on iCommons.org.

ccMixter (OS X) Widget

Mike Linksvayer, February 13th, 2007

Nathan whipped up an OS X Dashboard widget for playing ccMixter editors’ picks on your (Mac) desktop.

Snowy details on Nathan’s personal blog.

The hyperweb explained

Mike Linksvayer, February 12th, 2007

You’ve probably seen this video already, or at least noticed that others have blogged it. I didn’t get around to actually watching it until I noticed that Eben Moglen broke five plus months of blog silence to rave about it.

“Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us” by Michael Wesch is licensed under CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike, explores CC-related themes, but you should watch it because it’s a very well done work. Can’t wait to see the final cut (this is the 2nd draft) — and remixes.

The video is set to CC licensed music, as noted on YouTube:

The song is “There’s Nothing Impossible” by Deus, available for free at http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/103/
Deus offers music under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike 2.0 license, yet one more example of the interlinking of people sharing and collaborating this video is attempting to illustrate.

Freedom Multiplier

Mike Linksvayer, February 12th, 2007

Wendy Seltzer:

You can do great things with free content, and great things with free code, but combining the two multiplies their effect. So I found when I wanted to enhance my Free Software music system with more information about the compositions it played.

This specific post isn’t about Creative Commons and free software, but the point generalizes.

CC Music 2.0 Fueling Web 2.0

Mike Linksvayer, February 12th, 2007

The title of this post is a subheading from a great writeup of ccMixter’s new playlist features at Dave’s Imaginary Sound Space:

Make no mistake, ccMixter is the complete package. No other remix site commands the same level of respect amongst musicians, producers and content creators.

Read the entire article for a great overview, then check out 100 CC BY hits, a playlist put together by CC Creative Director Eric Steuer — 100 great tracks licensed under CC Attribution — free permission granted for remix and commercial use.

Also check out Dave’s post from early this month on Creative Commons Video Sharing Sites and Social Media Tools.

We’ve linked to Dave’s extended writeups a couple times previously. What if The Beatles had used Creative Commons Licenses? from November 2006 and Podsafe Music Making Sense from June 2005 are still very much worth exploring.