Digg Upgrades to the CC0 Waiver

Fred Benenson, May 27th, 2009

Joining the likes of Flickr and the Personal Genome Project, Digg has now chosen our CC0 Waiver for their content. Daniel Burka writes on the official Digg blog about their choice:

As of today, we’ve taken that one step further by upgrading our public domain license to the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) [waiver]. The CC0 [waiver] expresses that content posted on Digg is public domain even internationally. A minor point maybe, but our previous public domain [dedication] was only clear within the USA. When a friend from Creative Commons suggested that we move to a CC0 license, to even more clearly affirm our intentions, it seemed obvious. And, as we try to always do when we change something that affects the content that you (our users) submit to Digg, we’re trying to keep you informed about it.

Congrats to the Digg team for taking the step in the right direction for the public domain! Read more about why using CC0 for your public domain content is important here and here.

The Official Ninth Annual Media That Matters Film Festival is June 3rd in NYC

Fred Benenson, May 27th, 2009

Every year, Arts Engine produces the fantastic Media That Matters Film Festival. The festival awards and screens a dozen social justice shorts each year and then releases them for sale under our Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license on region-free unencrypted DVDs. This allows educators, fans, and audiences to arrange their own non-commercial screenings of the shorts and help promote them without having to spend time negotiating with MTM and the many different film makers participating in the festival.

This year’s Official Ninth Annual Media That Matters Film Festival is happening next Wednesday, June 3rd in NYC but there are hundreds of screenings organized all around the world. In conjunction with the NYC festival, there will be an impACT salon featuring the festival’s presenting partners that begins an hour prior to the screening at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) Visual Arts Theater.

Check out the official site for details, schedules, and downloads.

Also of interest may be the video Creative Commons and Media That Matters collaborated on in late 2008:

You can download the video and learn more about it on its video page.

Cadyou Takes CC to CAD & Digital Design

Fred Benenson, May 27th, 2009

All sorts of interesting things show up in our Twitter search feed, and yesterday we were thrilled to come across Cadyou via @sketchupshop. Cadyou is a community launched by Tom Moor in late 2008 whose goal is to create a resource of free, high quality files for everyone to use, available in the Public Domain and under Creative Commons licenses. One interesting component of Cadyou’s content is its moderation policy:

Unlike many websites which let user upload their own content, cadyou is moderated ensuring that each file made available reaches quality standards, is tagged well and has great thumbnails so it is easy to find what you need.

Sign up today for unlimited free downloads!

Yahoo Brings CC Filters to Image Search

Fred Benenson, May 26th, 2009

Forgive me, but a picture (screen shot) is worth a thousand words (searches):

Today, on Yahoo’s Search Blog, Polly Ng and Anuj Sahai announced the addition of CC license image filtering options to their image search and also explained why CC licenses are so important for finding images online:

Finding a great image online elicits a little thrill, but it can be tricky - if you’re looking for a pic to pop into a presentation or illustrate a Web page, you need to know if you’re allowed to use that photo, and how you can use it. Today, Yahoo! Image Search is launching a Creative Commons license filter that allows you to simply and quickly find images that are available for reuse.

When you use Yahoo! Image Search, you’ll now see a checkbox for Creative Commons allowing you to filter for images from Flickr that can be used commercially or that can be modified (remixed, tweaked, or built upon) with restrictions set by the image’s creator.

Congrats to the Yahoo! team for extending CC even further into their platform!

Teaching About Copyright and Fair Use for Media Literacy Education

Jane Park, May 26th, 2009

Last November, the Center for Social Media at AU released a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education, which followed on the heels of a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video. These guides were aimed at clearing up many of the urban myths surrounding copyright, especially when it came to classroom use of copyrighted materials.

Now, the Media Education Lab at Temple University has produced excellent resources based on the original guide to help teachers teach about copyright and fair use in their classrooms. Resources include lesson plans, Powerpoint slides, videos, case studies, podcasts, and FAQs. The lesson plans iterate on topics from the code such as “Understanding Copyright”, “The Cost of Copyright Confusion”, and “Defining and Applying Fair Use”.

What tickles me: that in order to find out just what you can do with these resources, you get to view and use them first—Learning fair use via fair using! To use these resources in your classroom or study group (or for simply personal edification), check them all out here.

Jamendo reaches 20,000 albums

Mike Linksvayer, May 25th, 2009

Congratulations to Jamendo:

20,000 albums? We can hardly believe it!

Well, it seems like just a few months ago we were celebrating 10,000 albums published on jamendo and this weekend we passed the 20,000 album mark!

Actually, it was 11 months ago to be precise. Look at it this way and you’ll understand why we’re the first to be impressed with the figures: it will have taken jamendo 3 years to gather 10,000 albums, and then just under one year later, that number has doubled!

It’s pretty safe to say we’re going strong. And even safer to say it’s all thanks to you: artists, members and everyone contributing to spread the word of free music!

You can see those 20,000 albums broken down by license at jamendo.com/creativecommons.

Speaking of “we can hardly believe it” and collections of CC licensed media, I recently noticed a post on this blog from 2005:

We’re also happy to see growth at Flickr has gone way beyond our expectations to nearly 1.5 million photos licensed for reuse.

Two months ago Flickr reached 100 million CC licensed photos.

Congratulations to Jamendo and may today’s surprise only hint at an astounding future.

Flickr Uses CC Zero for their Shapefiles

Fred Benenson, May 22nd, 2009

Rounding out the week of some exciting CC announcements, we wanted to pass along news of Flickr’s use of our CC Zero waiver for their shapefile dataset.

“What is a shapefile?” you may ask. Its a file containing shapes mathematically generated by the thousands of Flickr geotagged photos of particular neighborhoods, countries, and continents. The data can also be seen as reverse-engineered fuzzy maps created by user generated longitude and latitude coordinates that are then demarcated by Where-On-Earth IDs.

Still confused? Its 549mb of uncompressed XML public domain geo-glory. Aaron from the Flickr Development team explains their rationale for using CC Zero:

• We want people (developers, researchers and anyone else who wants to play) to find new and interesting ways to use the shapefiles and we recognize that, in many cases, this means having access to the entire dataset.
• We want people to feel both comfortable and confident using this data in their projects and so we opted for a public domain [waiver] so no one would have to spend their time wondering about the issue of licensing. We also think the work that the Creative Commons crew is doing is valuable and important and so we chose to release the shapefiles under the CC0 waiver as a show of support.
• We want people to create their own shapefiles and to share them so that other people (including us!) can find interesting ways to use them. We’re pretty sure there’s something to this “shapefile stuff” even if we can’t always put our finger on it so if publishing the dataset will encourage others to do the same then we’re happy to do so.

Thanks to the Flickr team for the show of support! Download the compressed XML shapefile here, or read more about the release here.

ProPublica Wants You to Steal Their Stories

Fred Benenson, May 22nd, 2009

A couple of weeks ago ProPublica posted a note on their site asking their users to “steal” their stories:

You can republish our articles and graphics for free, so long as you credit us, link to us, and don’t edit our material or sell it separately.

Put in CC terms, the public-interest journalism non-profit has chosen our Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. Since the announcement, The Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, USA Today, Salon, Politico, and Huffington Post have published ProPublica’s work and they’re encouraging other newsrooms to do so as well.

Check out the original announcement or ProPublica’s policy on advertising and commercial use.

Wikimedia Foundation board approves license migration

Mike Linksvayer, May 21st, 2009

The Wikimedia Foundation board has approved the licensing changes voted on by the community of Wikipedia and its sister sites. The accompanying press release includes this quote from Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig:

“Richard Stallman’s commitment to the cause of free culture has been an inspiration to us all. Assuring the interoperability of free culture is a critical step towards making this freedom work. The Wikipedia community is to be congratulated for its decision, and the Free Software Foundation thanked for its help. I am enormously happy about this decision.”

Hear, hear!

Earlier today we blogged that results of the Wikipedia community vote on adding the CC BY-SA license. Over 75% of votes were cast in approval of the change, but as has been pointed out by Wikimedia Foundation Deputy Director Erik Moeller and board member Kat Walsh, this number understates the level of support for the change. 14% voted “no opinion”, while only 10% opposed.

In any case we are deeply gratified that such an overwhelming majority (88% of those who voted with an opinion) approved this change worked on over several years by the Free Software Foundation, Wikimedia Foundation, and Creative Commons, are proud to stand with such trusted organizations, and will live up to that trust!

The addition of the CC BY-SA license to Wikimedia sites should occur over the next month. Now is a good time to start thinking about whether your works and projects ought to interoperate with Wikipedia. If you’re using (or switch to) CC BY-SA, content can flow in both directions (your work could be incorporated into Wikipedia, and you can incorporate Wikipedia content into your work). If you use CC BY or CC0, your work could be incorporated into Wikipedia, but not vice versa. If your work isn’t licensed, or is under a CC license with a non-commercial or no derivatives (NC or ND) term, nothing can flow in either direction, except by fair use or other copyright exception or limitation.

Wikipedia community votes 75% in favor of CC BY-SA

Mike Linksvayer, May 21st, 2009

Results of the WIkipedia community vote on licensing are now in:

The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has proposed that the copyright licensing terms on the wikis operated by the WMF — including Wikipedia — be changed to include the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) license in addition to the current GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). This will affect all text and rich media (images, sound, video, etc.) currently licensed under “GFDL 1.2 or later versions”. This change is meant to advance the WMF’s mission by increasing the compatibility and availability of free content. Further details and motivation for this change are explained in the licensing update proposal and the associated FAQ.

To gauge community support for adopting this change, a Wikimedia-wide vote was conducted between April 12 and May 3, 2009. The vote was managed by volunteers associated with the licensing update committee and conducted on servers controlled by the independent non-profit SPI.

Licensing Update Poll Result

“Yes, I am in favor of this change”	13242	75.8%
“No, I am opposed to this change”	1829	10.5%
“I do not have an opinion on this change”	2391	13.7%
Total votes cast and certified	17462

If “no opinion” votes are not included, the Yes/No percentage becomes 87.9%/12.1% (15071 votes).

For lots of background on why this is a great thing, see our post on the community vote and the previous posts it links to. CC Denmark public project lead Henrik Moltke’s immediate microblogged reaction is a good summary:

Wikimedia/pedia adopting CC a giant leap; will unite & focus strengths, facilitate participation + convey strengths of free licensing

Thanks for voting for licensing sanity!

As the results page says, the Wikimedia Foundation board must still approve any licensing change.