Vote: NetSquared Innovation Awards

Mike Linksvayer, April 9th, 2007

Voting for the NetSqaured Innovation Awards, previously blogged here, runs today through April 14. Update: Voting has been extended through April 16 at 5PM PDT.

You must register and vote for five to ten social enterprises. Twenty winners will receive expenses for two staff members to attend N2Y2 and participate in the NetSquared Technology Innovation Fund.

Here are four projects with free culture connections to strongly consider voting for:

• Open Community Radio: KRUU-LP 100.1 FM. Taking community radio to the next level with 99% locally produced content, running on 100% open source, promoting CC licensed content, and with a fantastic free culture interview show. More about KRUU in this previous post.
• Telecommunications and Microfinances for The Poor and The Poorest. A project of Free Culture Peru.
• OpenStreetMap. Street maps and other geodata under CC Attribution-ShareAlike.
• Open Source, Open Standards Video. Why this is important.

Addendum: In other voting news, Wikitravel (see our featured commoner interview with Wikitravel’s founders) is nominated for a Webby award in the travel category. Several other CC-friendly sites are also nominated, including Flickr in many categories. Anyone with some time to look at a lot of sites can vote. If you do, cast one for Wikitravel!

To build upon

Mike Linksvayer, April 5th, 2007

When we launched version 3.0 of the CC licenses February 23 we also switched on a number of graphical, language, and technical updates. This is the first of a very tardy series of posts about those updates.

Creative Commons license deeds are the “human readable” explanation of the “lawyer readable” licenses (e.g., see the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 deed and Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 legalcode) and have always (see Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 as captured by the Internet Archive in 2003) used icons to represent the requirements and prohibitions associated with a license.

Coinciding with 3.0 we’ve started using icons to call out the freedoms granted with a license:

The “remix” building blocks icon is derived from the FreeCulture.org logo:

Thanks for the great idea!

FreeCulture.org is “an international student movement for free culture” and a great way to get involved. Check out their suggestions ranging from 5 minute projects to starting your own chapter.

We’ve featured FreeCulture.org events a number of times on this blog, including a recent Creative Commons art show by Free Culture Florida.

Work@CC: web developer/sysadmin

Mike Linksvayer, April 4th, 2007

Creative Commons is hiring a web developer/sysadmin (let’s call it a web engineer) for its San Francisco office. The technical requirements are broad but not deep — the ideal candidate would have the ability to learn quickly and willingness to tackle any technical task with gusto — from IT drudgework to developing cool web apps. See the job description for application details.

Please forward to anyone who would be interested but just happens to be offline for a spell. What other excuse would they have for not reading the CC blog? :-)

Also check out our openings for General Counsel and CC Learn Executive Director.

Videoblogging Week Report: Video Bumpers for Your CC Licensed Content

Jon Phillips, April 4th, 2007

As mentioned before, Jay Dedman invited myself and Colette Vogel to speak about Creative Commons Licensing and the Podcasting Legal Guide as the kick-off event to this week, the annual international Videoblogging Week. Both Colette and I led a discussion with many popular videobloggers outside in a nice sunny park in mission bay in SF. We then went indoors where I discussed how Videobloggers can mark their video files with video bumpers (in accordance with our trademark policies of course), to signal to others how they may use original content.

Please check out the video bumpers that people created last saturday and remember that marking your videos (and other content) visually before uploading to sites like Youtube and MySpace is important for signaling how you want your work used in accordance with a CC license of your choice. Don’t forget to “Leave Your Mark.”

ccSearch updated

Mike Linksvayer, April 3rd, 2007

As part of an ongoing overhaul of creativecommons.org sites Alex Roberts has given search.creativecommons.org a very attractive new look.

Keep an eye out for new CC-enabled search services. If you aspire to be one, check out ccSearch integration on our wiki.

Your open source toolset

Mike Linksvayer, April 2nd, 2007

Last fall we mentioned a great post by Wikipedia leader (and now CC board member) Jimmy Wales on why free knowledge requires free software and free file formats.

Now Wikipedian Erik Möller weighs in with a practical post on Wikimedia’s open source toolset, which may be seen as a paean to open source media creation software generally (Wikipedia leading the way).

Erik specifically calls out Inkscape, a drawing application with contributions from now CC employee Jon Phillips (his open source contributions were crucial to getting a job here).

Inkscape also happens to have a built-in feature enabling CC licensing of drawings, something we hope to see in many more content creation applications.

The sharing economy in Japanese

Mike Linksvayer, April 2nd, 2007

CC chairperson Joi Ito writes:

Impress, a Japanese publisher, just released a Mook (magazine/book) called The Future of Web 2.0 - The Sharing Economy based on presentations at the Digital Garage New Context Conference last year in Tokyo. The book is in Japanese. There are excerpts from presentations by Mitchell Baker, John Buckman, Tantek Çelik, David Isenberg, Lawrence Lessig, Jun Murai, Hiroyuki Nakano and Cory Ondrejka.

A really cool thing about this is that Impress has decided to release this mook under CC BY-NC (v 2.1 Japan). They have also made a PDF versions of each section available for download simultaneously under the same license on their site.

For those who cannot read Japanese, we’ve recently blogged about Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons (Australia) and Community Created Content (Finland), both in English and also CC licensed.

Open Content Licensing - Cultivating the Creative Commons

Eva, April 2nd, 2007

“What if Rupert Murdoch’s Fox … bought the rights to Socrates’ dinner parties?” - Richard Neville
“Never in our history have fewer exercised more power over our culture than now.” - Professor Lawrence Lessig

It is a great pleasure to announce the release of Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons, a new publication of Sydney University Press in conjunction with the Queensland University of Technology and the ARC Centre for Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. Edited by the Creative Commons Australia project lead, Professor Brian Fitzgerald, Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons brings together papers from some of the most prominent thinkers of our time on the internet, law and the importance of open content licensing in the digital age.

Drawing on material presented at the Queensland University of Technology conference of the same name in January 2005, the text provides a snapshot of the thoughts of over 30 Australian and international experts – including Professor Lawrence Lessig, Futurist Richard Neville and the Hon Justice Ronald Sackville – on topics surrounding the international Creative Commons, from the landmark Eldred v Ashcroft copyright term decision to the legalities of digital sampling in a remix world.

A PDF version of the book is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives licence from the QUT e-Prints Archive. Hardcopies (also under a BY-NC-ND licence) can be ordered from the Sydney University Press. Individual chapters are available for free electronic downloaded here.

For more information on the book and its contents, see here.