FUSE! Thai Creative Platform

Cameron Parkins, March 28th, 2008

FUSE! is a Thai creative platform that aims to connect filmmakers, musicians, photographers, and other creative individuals in one space while encouraging reuses of each other’s work. All content is released under a CC BY-NC-SA license, making the sharing and reuse of these works not only encouraged but legally sound.

The best works are published in a quarterly publication (with DVD accompaniment) which is distributed to various bookstores and universities in Thailand, motivating content creators to showcase their works through FUSE as well as attracting others to go to the website and participate. In addition to this, FUSE holds monthly “Bar Camp style” meetups where creators showcase their various projects to one another, fostering off-line collaboration in tandem with the FUSE’s online presence.

Best of Jamglue, Round 1

Cameron Parkins, March 28th, 2008

Jamglue are up to their old tricks, this time holding a “Best of Jamglue” contest to find the best rappers in their community. While the due-date to enter has passed, voting continues until this Sunday (3/30) so get over there, listen to some CC BY licensed entries, and get voting!

You can read more about Jamglue in our Featured Commoner interview.

CC Press Kit Relaunched

Alex Roberts, March 27th, 2008

We are pleased to announce a brand new Press Kit page. Based on user requests and feedback, we have completely redesigned it to make it easier for you to find and use specific CC graphics.

As before, all graphics are available in various formats for any purpose, including large format transparent PNGs — which work well in presentations. The page also features direct links to vector versions of our icons and license buttons, and are recommended for use in videos and printed works.

Please read our policies page for information on how our logos may be used, and see our marking project for examples and best practices on marking your work.

8.5 GB of CC-Licensed Samples for the OLPC

Cameron Parkins, March 27th, 2008

Great news from the OLPC project - 8.5 GB worth of sound library samples have been donated to the project by the Berklee College of Music, Berklee Music Synthesis alumni (including electronic musician BT and the international Csound Developer community), M-Audio, Digidesign, and the Open Path Music group! The samples are being released under a CC BY license and while they are intended for (and facilitated by) the OLPC project, they are available publicly, making this a a huge contribution not only to the OLPC but also to those looking for free, high quality, samples in general.

You can check out all the samples on the OLPC wiki as well as see a breakdown of the OLPC’s music making capabilities over at Create Digital Music. The OLPC is paving a new road for contemporary music education with this announcement and it will be absolutely fascinating to see how these samples are put to use by their intended practitioners. From OLPC:

“One Laptop per Child has inspired musicians to donate their sound collections to the children of the world,” said Dr. Richard Boulanger, professor of music synthesis at the Berklee College of Music and the organizer of the Berklee collection being donated to OLPC. “By providing extraordinary access to the resources to play, mix, transform, imitate and create sounds, sound effects, music and audio art works, this donation will enable children with XO laptops to learn about music and sound, and to learn about themselves and their world. This collection will inspire and promote incredible music-making on the XO laptop and will invigorate the creative audio work of all computer musicians.”

OpenSocial creates foundation; continues to license specifications under CC-BY

Timothy Vollmer, March 26th, 2008

Yesterday Google, MySpace, and newest partner Yahoo! announced the formation of the OpenSocial Foundation, a non-profit organization that works “to ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web.” From the press release:

The foundation will provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, documentation, intellectual property, and other issues related to the evolution of the OpenSocial platform, while also ensuring all stakeholders share influence over its future direction.

OpenSocial continues to release all specifications under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

OpenSocial defines a common API (application programming interface) for social applications across multiple websites. OpenSocial helps developers avoid reinventing the wheel by “providing common ‘plumbing’ that lets social applications run on many different websites without requiring duplicate work from either developers or the websites.”

Read the OpenSocial Foundation press release here.

“Wikipedia Takes Manhattan” Free Culture NYC meet-up

Timothy Vollmer, March 26th, 2008

NYC affiliates, check out this awesome free culture photography scavenger hunt being put on by Free Culture @ NYU and Free Culture @ Columbia.

Each member of the winning team will receive an iPod shuffle loaded with Creative Commons music! Second and third place teams will win copies of “Wikipedia, The Missing Manual” donated by O’Reilly.

All photos will be uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons for inclusion into Wikipedia articles about NYC that need photos. We’ve got hundreds of locations, sites, and things to document for Wikipedia and it should be a really fun day.

The event will be held Friday, March 28 (April 4 is rain date). See the announcement here.

Columbia Music Entertainment & Good Crew Offer CC-Licensed Vocal Tracks

Cameron Parkins, March 25th, 2008

Good Crew, a pop-rock band from Japan, have released the vocal tracks for all the songs from their new album, Nippon Husky, under a CC BY-NC-SA license. While this in itself is great news (we always love to hear about people using licenses!) this is especially noteworthy in that Good Crew are signed to Columbia Music Entertainment in Japan (and got said recording contract through user voting), making this the first major label release in Japan to use CC licenses.

Good Crew will be holding a remix contest using the tracks from now until May 10th (get the tracks here), with Good Crew choosing their two favorite remixes for prize winnings. The Grand Prize winner will receive a Sanyo Xacti with the second place winner (and the Special Humor Award) recieving a $100 Amazon Gift card. From ejovi:

OtoRevo has created a lot of first. OtoRevo and Columbia Music Entertainment were the first label to sign a major artist (Good Crew) exclusively from user voting. Now we have done another first, we are the first major label to release tracks from a major release under Creative Commons.

You can download the mp3 vocal tracks from Good Crew’s album on the OtoRevo website.

We are releasing the vocal tracks for anyone to remix and mashup. The most interesting remixer will win a Xacti camera. Unfortunately the page is in Japanese, but downloading and listening to the tracks is pretty simple. I love Kuroki-san’s voice (lead singer). The name of the album is Nippon Ha:Ski. When you hear her voice you will know why.

Even if you don’t want to remix, download and listen to the tracks. Of course if you like it, you might like the album!

Flickr Re-Use Stories

Cameron Parkins, March 25th, 2008

Calling all Flickr photographers and CC-licensors - we are compiling a list of interesting and/or unique stories of re-use of CC-licensed photos on Flickr and we need your help!

If you or someone you know has had their photographs reused in an intriguing way, please send the story and corresponding photograph to melissa AT creativecommons DOT org. This is super significant in helping us explain to the larger community why CC is important for photographers. We have a short time frame and any help from those in the CC community is greatly appreciated!

Macedonian translation of 11 Shakespeare plays under CC license

Michelle Thorne, March 25th, 2008

From CC Macedonia (via Metamorphosis):

“Creative Commons Content Portal for Macedonia published Macedonian translations of eleven Shakespeare plays as downloadable e-books, made available by the renowned storyteller and translator Dragi Mihajlovski.

The e-books have been published in weekly batches of two to three PDF-files between the 8th of February and the 20th of March 20, 2008.”

The translated plays are made available under Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Macedonia.

Clarification: It should be noted that while translations of public domain works are fully copyrightable and therefore eligible to be licensed under a Creative Commons license, the original work remains unaffected and in the public domain.

Creative Commons Expands Documentation project

Timothy Vollmer, March 23rd, 2008

We’re always trying to make Creative Commons licenses easier to understand and use. From the get-go, human-readable copyright licenses have been a CC mainstay. Creative Commons is excited to announce the expansion of a documentation project that explains various facets of Creative Commons licensing. From the press release:

The initiative includes links and PDF downloads to information on critical CC specifications, recommendations, research studies and tutorials. Some of the topics covered include the CC+ and CC0 projects, a simple licensing how-to, and best practices for integrating Creative Commons licensing in websites. The documentation project also offers posters, flyers and other creative media such as the “Sharing Creative Works” comic book.

We encourage the CC community to use the information provided, translate these documents into other languages, and help create new documentation too!

Learn more about the Documentation project and read the full press release.