Commons News
Free Culture live
Colin Mutchler, featured in our second Creative Commons movie “Reticulum Rex“, is giving a live performance of his audio/visual work called “Free Culture” September 15th in Brooklyn, NY.
No Comments »“Sourced by Larry Lessig and his new book of the same name, Free Culture is multimedia performance by Brooklyn based artist Colin Mutchler that mixes music, image, video and spoken word to speak his personal journey, both physically and digitally, through the last four years. ”
Gnomoradio on Slashdot
Last October we wrote about Gnomoradio, software that helps people share CC-licensed music.
Gnomoradio has made good progress since then. Check out the new screenshots.
One Gnomoradio screenshot. Click for more.
Now Slashdot has taken notice, with ensuing discussion.
No Comments »Jesus Rocks
Three Taiwan Golden Melody Award winners, including a famous singer and composer, Yue-hsin Chu, and a group of enthusiastic young Christian musicians have come up with what they call their first native gospel album — JESUS ROCKS.
JESUS ROCKS is the first Asian album using a Creative Commons license (Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike Taiwan).
The cover text reads: “JESUS ROCKS represents the sprit of reciprocal sharing. It also conveys the charity of Jesus Christ in English, Mandarin and dialects of Mandarin. JESUS ROCKS covers diverse styles, such as rock’n'roll, folk, blues and funk. So it is suitable for different generations to listen.”
No Comments »Imminent: Launch Events in Taiwan and Austria
Our project’s international roll-out continues. Two more countries have now come up with their local licenses.
First, on Saturday, Sep 4, Lawrence Lessig will be speaking in Taipei, where the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, as the Taiwan project lead, has completed the porting process and is now presenting the licenses to the island’s public. Special thanks to Yih-Suan from the Acadamia Sinica, who put most of the finishing touches on the Taiwanese licenses.
Second, in the Alps, the transposed Austrian licenses will be celebrated and discussed during the week-long Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. Lawrence Lessig will participate in a symposium on ‘Commons & Communities – Social Life in the Digital Age’ at the Brucknerhaus on Sep 6, 10.30am, while Roland will say a few words on the launch event proper at the Brucknerhaus on Sep 7, 3pm. Much work on the Austrian licenses was done by Julia Kueng and Georg Pleger, our local project leads.
As an important signal for all open source projects and free software initiatives, Creative Commons also won the Golden Nica in the 2004 Prix Ars Electronica’s Net Vision category. Christiane will receive the prize on behalf of CC on Friday, Sep 3, at the Prix Art gala event in Linz.
Anybody interested in attending one of the talks above and thus getting in touch with us is welcome.
No Comments »Our updated Search
We’ve had our own beta search engine for the past six months, but it was mostly a proof of concept, to see if we could build a search engine that recorded the semantics of web page metadata. Like any proof of concept launched to the public, it was slow, frequently returned zero results, and was difficult to keep up to date. A few months back, the guys behind the open source search engine project Nutch contacted us and they helped us develop a new search engine based on Nutch, with support for Creative Commons metadata thrown in.
We flipped the switch last week and have been testing it ever since. Compared to the last version of our search engine, this one is blazingly fast to return results, the results are much more specific to what you’re looking for, and it is constantly keeping up to date on over 1 million pages with Creative Commons license info in them.
Here are some sample searches I came up with while playing with the format and options:
“Show me all photos of Paris that I can make derivative works from and sell afterwards“
“I’d like to find songs about Love that I can remix“
“Find me some CC licensed music videos“
“Has anyone ever written about the Statue of Liberty?“
Overall, a drastic improvement. If you find any bugs or come up with any other specific searches that the search engine performed well, be sure to drop a comment and let us know.
No Comments »Freedom of Information and Copyright
Ever had trouble convincing someone that copyright matters beyond just copyright? That it bumps into questions of censorship, freedom of information, even plain-old civics more every day? If so, here’s a nice anecdote to pull out next time.
From the AP:
The Defense Department spent $70,500 to produce a Humphrey Bogart-themed video called “The People’s Right to Know” to teach employees to respond to citizen requests for information. But when it came to showing the tape to the public, the Pentagon censored some of the footage.
Why? Copyright concerns. Read more.
Thanks, Chris.
No Comments »Liberated Games
Liberated Games is a new project that offers downloadable versions (some with source code) of commercial video games that are several years old. The creators of the games have given their permission for the free downloads and offer them under a variety of licenses.
Technology moves quickly these days, making software, books, and information outdated within just a few years after release. It’s great to see the creators of all these games acknowledge this and allow fans to play their old favorites freely.
No Comments »Somebody please tell Bjork about Creative Commons
Here’s why. Another reason: she’s cool. It’s ok to give her our phone number. Thanks.
(Via Xeni @ BoingBoing.)
No Comments »Shipwreck Central
Shipwreck Central is a companion site for a team of divers that explore various shipwrecks around the world. They host live chats, teaching aids, and information about shows they’ve made from diving footage. For the bits of downloadable audio and video, they’ve chosen a Creative Commons license and their copyright page explains why, even though they are a somewhat commercial endeavor:
16 Comments »We have thought long and hard about copyright issues here at Shipwreck Central. As creators we spend a lot of time, effort and money recording and editing the material you see here, and of course we wish to protect our copyright from unfair and unlicensed commercial use. However we are also aware that there are new cultural and technological dynamics at play which may result in legitimate creative and educational uses of our video that would not be possible under strict copyright laws.
For this reason we have decided to go with a Creative Commons license for the video and audio available in the free areas of Shipwreck Central. Information about the Creative Commons License can be found below.
Creative Commons in Sweden
It just keeps growing: the International Commons (iCommons) expands to Sweden, under the leadership of the premier law firm Lindahl and man-about-the-Net Mikael Pawlo. Public discussion of the Swedish drafts of the Creative Commons licenses has begun.
No Comments »
