ccSalon SF next Wednesday! CC and Open Source

Allison Domicone, August 5th, 2009

CC friends and fans in the Bay Area: we hope you can join us next week at our ccSalon, when, in the spirit of Open Source World, we’ll hear about CC and open source technology from our three presenters for the evening:

* Chris DiBona, Open Source Program Manager for Google, Inc.
* Evan Prodromou, co-Founder of WikiTravel and founder of Identi.ca.
* Nathan Yergler, Creative Commons’ Chief Technology Officer.

When: Wednesday, August 12, 7-9pm
Location: PariSoMa, 1436 Howard St. (map and directions). Plenty of street parking available. (Please note, the space is located up two steep flights of stairs, and unfortunately does not currently have elevator access.)

Light refreshments will be provided.

Check it out on Upcoming and Facebook. We hope to see you there!

Code Rush Now Available Under CC BY-NC-SA

Fred Benenson, August 5th, 2009

Waxy.org reports that Code Rush — the commercially-unavailable documentary from 2000 about the open-sourcing of the Netscape code base and the Mozilla project which gave birth to Firefox, is now available under our Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. This is a crucial part of the Internet’s history so we highly recommend you watch it and share it with your friends.

Download Code Rush here, watch the entire film annotated by Andy Baio on viddler here, or check out the official Code Rush homepage here.

Thanks to everyone who made this wonderful gift to the commons possible!

Carpool Conversations: CC-Licensed Video Collaboration Between Pink Cloud Events and Honda

Cameron Parkins, August 4th, 2009

Carpool Conversations is a newly launched video series from LA-based Pink Cloud Events. Produced in collaboration with Honda, the 3-part series aims to capture intimate and unexpected conversations between strangers sharing a ride in a Honda Insight. While the topics vary from episode to episode, a common thread through out is the importance of sharing experiences – a concept that resonates strongly with CC’s mission.

The first episode finds members of LA-based fruit finding collaborative Fallen Fruit and Damien Somerset of green video site Zaproot discussing the merits of hybrid cars, free fruit, and a variety of other topics. This sharing of information extends beyond the car ride as Carpool Conversations is released under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative license, allowing the video to be legally and openly shared across the web.

Thankfully, this is just the first in a delightful series – the next episode of Carpool Conversations features Top Chef Master contestant, Elizabeth Falkner of Orson/Citizen Cake, community manager Michelle Broderick of yelp.com, and tech-chocolate maker Timothy Childs of tcho.com.

Smithsonian Commons and Sustainable Content Usage Policies

Fred Benenson, August 3rd, 2009

On Thursday, Michael Edson of the Smithsonian posted on the Smithsonian 2.0 blog that they had released their “Web and New Media Strategy” with the purpose of laying a groundwork for a Smithsonian Commons:

The strategy talks about an updated digital experience, a new learning model that helps people with their “lifelong learning journeys,” and the creation of a Smithsonian Commons—a new part of our digital presence dedicated to stimulating learning, creation, and innovation through open access to Smithsonian research, collections and communities.

Of particular interest to our community is that the report PDF itself (and its draft wiki) are both licensed under our permissive, Attribution license. More substantially is the report’s section on the proposed content usage policy of the Smithsonian Commons:

Content Usage: Establish a pan-Institutional policy for sharing and using the Smithsonian’s digital content, with particular focus on Copyright and Public Domain policies that encourage the appropriate re-use and sharing of Smithsonian resources.

Congratulations to the Smithsonian for thinking about the future lives of their content in such a sustainable fashion. We’re very excited to see the future developments that the Smithsonian Commons brings to free culture on an institutional scale.

Rights Expression vs. Rights Enforcement: clarifying the Associated Press story

Ben Adida, August 1st, 2009

The Associated Press wants to track reuse of their content through a “news registry.” This registry “will employ a microformat for news developed by AP”:

The microformat will essentially encapsulate AP and member content in an informational “wrapper” that includes a digital permissions framework that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online and which also supplies the critical information needed to track and monitor its usage.

While Creative Commons is very sympathetic to the difficulty of explaining technical concepts in a short press release, we’re worried that the AP’s explanation, and in particular their reference to the Creative Commons’ Rights Expression Language (ccREL), might well be confusing.

The reference to Creative Commons appears in the AP’s microformat, hNews, which introduces hRights, a supposed “generalization” of ccREL. hRights is presumably the “digital permissions framework” that the AP diagrams as a box/wrapper around news content in order to “track and monitor usage.” Unfortunately, as Ed Felten points out, this claim doesn’t add up. Microformats and other web-based structured data, including ccREL, cannot track, monitor, or generally enforce anything. They’re labels, i.e. Post-It notes attached to a document, not locked boxes blocking access to the content.

When Creative Commons launched in 2002, we were often asked “is Creative Commons a form of DRM?” Our answer: no, we help publishers express their rights, but we don’t dabble in enforcement, because enforcement technologies are unable to respect important, complex, and often subjective concepts like fair use. Thus, ccREL is about expression and notification of rights, not about enforcement.

And when you think about it, there’s really no other realistic way. If the AP actually wants a “beacon” that reports usage information back to the mothership, then every endpoint must be programmed to perform this beacon functionality. Before it delivers content, every server must check that the client will promise to become a beacon. Which means the AP wants  an architecture where every cell phone, computer, or other networked device is locked down centrally, able to run only software that is verified to comply with this policy. That’s another reason why we don’t dabble in enforcement: the costs of Digital Rights Enforcement (or its politically correct equivalent, Digital Rights Management) to publishers, users, to our culture and to our ability to innovate are astronomically high.

Then there’s the issue of “RSS syndication” compatibility. We simply don’t see how the AP’s proposed system would allow both widespread beacon enforcement and compatibility with existing formats like RSS. Compatibility means that current RSS tools remain usable. Obviously, these tools do not currently perform the AP’s rights enforcement, so how could they magically be made to start phoning home now?

That said, there is an interesting nugget in the AP’s proposal, one which we encourage them to pursue: tagging content with rights, origin, and means of attribution is a good proposal. When Creative Commons began the work that led to ccREL, there were no established or open standards for expressing this type of structured information on the web, so we had to lay down some new infrastructure. When we published ccREL, we made it easy for others to innovate on top of ccREL: we included “independence and extensibility” as the first principle for expressing license information in a machine readable format. We based ccREL on RDF and RDFa to enable this standards-based extensibility.

The AP could, rather than reinvent a subset of ccREL using an incompatible and news-specific syntax, simply use ccREL and add their own news-specific fields. By doing this, they would immediately plug into the growing set of tools that parse and interpret rights expressed via ccREL. We would be happy to help, but we built ccREL in such a way that we don’t need to be involved if the AP would prefer to go it alone. And, of course, the AP can use ccREL with copyright licenses more restrictive than those we offer, if they prefer.

CC Talks With: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Cameron Parkins, July 29th, 2009

Opened to the public in 1903, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is a world-class museum that houses more than 5,000 art objects, including works by Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Raphael, Degas, and Sargent. It is also known for its phenomenal music program, lectures, and symposia, as well as the museum’s nationally recognized Artist-in-Residence and educational programs.

Online, it is well-known as the producer and distributor of The Concert, a classical music podcast that features unreleased live performances by master musicians and talented young artists, recorded at the museum’s Sunday Concert Series. The podcast is free, distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license (Music Sharing), and widely popular. The Concert was one of the first classical music collections to be shared under a CC license, and the ISGM was one of the first art museums to actively distribute digital content under a CC license.

We’ve talked about The Concert before, but wanted to learn more about the series and the decision to use CC licenses for the project. We recently caught up with Director Anne Hawley and Curator of Music Scott Nickrenz, who were able to provide a lot of great information about the series and how CC licenses have played a role in its success.

Those in the CC community best know of the ISGM as a result of your highly successful The Concert podcast. What was the inspiration for the podcast series? Why did you choose to release it under a CC license?

Anne Hawley: We launched The Concert – the museum’s first podcast – in September 2006, as a way to continue the museum’s long history of supporting artists and creative artistic thinking. During Isabella Gardner’s lifetime, the museum flowed with artistic activity: John Singer Sargent painted, Nellie Melba sang, and Ruth St. Denis performed the cobra dance within these walls. Isabella Gardner was a committed patron of artists and musicians and the museum has always followed her lead. The podcast is the latest example of this; it’s a modern way to bring the museum’s wealth of programming to a wider audience, promote the exceptional work of the musicians who perform here, and ultimately expand the reach of classical music.

Music has always been an important part of the Gardner. When the museum opened on New Years Night 1903, attendees enjoyed a performance of Bach, Mozart, Chausson, and Schumann by members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra—“a concert of rare enjoyment” according to one guest. During Gardner’s lifetime, the museum hosted visits and performances by well-known musicians and rising stars including composers Gustav Mahler and Vincent d’Indy, pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski, and cellist Pablo Casals, and memorable concerts including the 1903 premiere of Loeffler’s Pagan Poem, composed and performed in honor of Isabella Gardner’s birthday. Four years later, the work had its “official” premiere at the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Today, the Gardner’s music series is the oldest of its kind in the country, with weekly concerts and special programs that enrich and draw musical connections to the museum’s special exhibitions and permanent collection, while continuing Isabella Gardner’s legacy as a music lover and patron of the arts.
Read More…

Copyright tools

Jane Park, July 29th, 2009

Last year, I blogged about the Copyright Advisory Network’s nifty digital copyright slider, a tool that helps you tell whether a work is still copyrighted or whether it’s in the public domain.

Since then, the OITP at ALA (Office for Information Technology Policy of the American Library Association) has developed and published two new tools: the Fair Use Evaluator and the Exceptions for Instructors eTool. From the announcement,

“The Fair Use Evaluator is an online tool that can help users understand how to determine if the use of a protected work is a “fair use.” It helps users collect, organize, and document the information they may need to support a fair use claim, and provides a time-stamped PDF document for the users’ records.”

“The Exceptions for Instructors eTool guides users through the educational exceptions in U.S. copyright law, helping to explain and clarify rights and responsibilities for the performance and display of copyrighted content in traditional, distance and blended educational models.”

In addition to these two new tools, check out the existing Section 108 Spinner, which “help[s] you determine whether or not a particular reproduction is covered by [Section 108] exemption” that “allows libraries & archives, under certain circumstances, to make reproductions of copyrighted materials without the permission of the copyright holder.”

All three tools are licensed CC BY NC-SA.

Data supplement to “What status for ‘open’?”

Alex Kozak, July 28th, 2009

ccLearn has published the first data supplement to our report “What status for ‘open’? An examination of the licensing policies of open educational organizations and projects,” entitled “Data Supplement to ‘What status for ‘open’?’ A graphical view of the licensing policies of open educational organizations and projects.” (PDF warning)

This supplement provides a graphical view of the licensing landscape within online education, drawing data from ODEPO, a database on our recently launched OpenEd. We find that a large proportion of educational sites are protected by “All Rights Reserved” copyright, including many sites that self-describe as “open,” which indicates a misconception of what it means to be an open resource.

ODEPO was compiled in MediaWiki, the platform that powers Wikipedia. And just like Wikipedia, anyone with an account on OpenEd can contribute to the database by adding organizations or editing current data. Future data supplements will include the most up-to-date data from ODEPO, so the more you contribute, the more research opportunities there are!

OpenEd—the new Open Education Community site

Jane Park, July 28th, 2009

Some of you may already be familiar with the term open ed, short for open education—which represents the fantastic movement around opening up educational resources so that anyone, anywhere, can access, use, and derive existing educational materials in new, creative ways or to simply adapt them to their unique individual needs and local contexts. There are so many great educational materials out there—some already openly licensed and a great deal more in the public domain—and the problem is that a lot of people still don’t know about them or how to use them. Similarly, the open education movement has produced some really exciting projects and programs in recent years, but there is no global landing space for these inspiring movers and shakers to really connect as a coherent community.

Open Ed, the new Open Education Community site, is the result of brainstorming with other initiatives in the movement on how to provide such a space. We designed the site for open education community members, but also for teachers, learners, and those who just want to get involved. We were able to build it thanks to the strong support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Open Ed is hosted by ccLearn, but we are merely providing the web space. We’ve done some initial work on it, but the site is yours—be you an OER advocate, a teacher wanting to connect with other teachers, or a learner who would love to do the same. And you can contribute in any way you like, because Open Ed runs on MediaWiki, the same software that powers Wikipedia. Additionally, Open Ed utilizes the Semantic MediaWiki extension to enable data querying and analysis. For added functionality, we have installed various other useful extensions.

Wait… hasn’t this site been up for a while?

You’re right; it’s been public on the web for a couple of months now. Some of you may already have accounts. Others have even blogged about it previously. But we haven’t made the official announcement launch until now because we wanted to get some initial feedback from existing community members. So we need your help! Please spread the word, via your personal and professional channels—and most of all, use the space for what you need to do! It’s a wiki. That means you can create a page for your own project, add your project to ODEPO (the Open Database of Educational Projects and Organizations) for others to find, run your own data query for research purposes, or do virtually anything else you deem necessary to strengthen and promote open education, including translating the entire site into other languages. Not to mention that content is a little lacking right now, and it’s up to us to make it a great landing place for newbies to open education.

Give us feedback!

Please let us know what you think. Anyone can add to or improve the space by simply clicking “edit”, but as the hosts of this space, we would love to help with the process. You can also share your thoughts on Twitter with an #opened hashtag.

Lastly, thanks to White Whale, an Oakland-based consulting, design, and development company, who designed Open Ed and helped us with some of our messaging points.

Happy exploring!

Tonight at the Commonwealth Club (SF)

Kaitlin Thaney, July 28th, 2009

From the Science Commons blog …

Commoners and digerati alike will come together tonight at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco for a vibrant discussion on the intersection of science and the Web. The event, “Making the Web Work for Science”, will be moderated by Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, joined by panelists Stephen Friend (Sage), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), and our own John Wilbanks (Science Commons).

The night will be dedicated to the idea of bringing Web efficiencies to scientific research – a core theme seen in our work and thinking here at Science Commons. We now have the tools and understanding to bring together open research and data on a global scale, embedded with the freedoms necessary to be able to fully utilize it. Come help us further discuss this concept with some of the top names in the Bay area tech community as well as open science advocates.

The event (currently sold out, but stay tuned) kicks off at 6 p.m. with a networking reception; the main event beginning at 6:30. A private reception will follow. Tickets are $8 for Commonwealth Club members, $15 for non-members, and $7 for students with valid ID.