Singapore proudly celebrates the launch of the localized Creative Commons Licenses

Patricia Escalera, July 25th, 2008

We are delighted to announce the successful localization of the Creative Commons licenses in Singapore, the 47th worldwide to do so. The CC Singapore team, led by Associate Professor Samtani Anil and Assistant Professor Giorgios Cheliotis, has worked under the auspices of the Centre for Asia Pacific Technology Law & Policy (CAPTEL) and in collaboration with Creative Commons International to port the licenses to Singaporean law.

The launch event will be celebrated on Sunday, July 27, at the International Symposium on Electronic Art. The ceremony will be followed by several panels organized by CATPEL and Creative Commons Singapore on copyright issues in digital media and a keynote address from Professor Lawrence Lessig. For more in information we invite you to read our press release.

Congratulations, CC Singapore!

“Yes We’re Open” and “Free Culture TV” Launch as Miro Channels

Fred Benenson, July 25th, 2008

The Miro team have put their summer video intern, Parker Higgins to work launching two new channels for the open-video application: 

The goal of these channels is to showcase interesting and entertaining material from all over the internet that’s been released under open licenses. Free Culture TV is more specialized, and will contain programming from the Free Culture movement: documentaries, lectures, or short films that address the struggle against a permissions-based society. Yes, We’re Open! will have all kinds of entertainment, from feature length movies to documentaries, shorts, music videos, and anything else you can imagine, all openly licensed.

Miro defines ‘openly licensed’ as:

… an alternative to the “all rights reserved” associated with copyright. When people assign an open license to their work, they are giving the public certain rights, like the freedom to copy and distribute, or to remix and mash up, depending on the terms of the license. One popular example are the Creative Commons licenses, which are applied to many of the videos in these channels.

If you don’t already have Miro installed, download it here. Once you’re set up, click on the following links to automatically subscribe to the channels that Parker is curating:

• Free Culture TV 1-click subscribe
• Yes, We’re Open! 1-click subscribe.

Most importantly, if you have content to submit to either of the channels, get in contact with Parker.

Featured Commoner: Jamison Young

Cameron Parkins, July 25th, 2008

Jamison Young is a musician who records endlessly and plays live as often as he can. Young releases all his music under a CC licence, some through ‘fairplay’ label (and former Featured Commoner) Beatpick, who helped get Young’s track “Memories Child” into the soundtrack for new feature film “The X-Files: I Want to Believe“. We Caught up with Young and asked him some questions regarding his decision to use CC licences and what his current and future plans are - read on to find out more.

photo by Guillaunme Charriau | CC BY

Can you give our readers a bit of background about yourself and your music?

I’ve been writing, performing and recording songs for a while, yet its only in the last five or so years that I have settled down enough to get some kind of career going with what I do. I play live, although mostly based in Europe and that is where I’m based - I’m originally from Australia.

What are your influences?

Any song that lets me escape, songs from the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s of all types and also contemporary artists like Beck. I like songs that I can listen to again and again yet still stay fresh. Learning about copyright and Creative Commons has given me a new view on my influences though.

What licenses do you use and why?

I licensed the songs from the album “Shifting Sands Of A Blue Car” under a Creative Commons Attribution license. When I look at the amount of self published art that is used commercially compared to published content and then look at how much quality self published content is available online, less restrictions for my music makes more sense for me. Also, a lot of home creators that use a song might want to use the content in conjunction with a services like youtube or myspace, and who can say if these services are a commercial or non-commercial from the user of the contents point of view.
Read More…

Jamendo and MP3tunes: Free music for free lockers

Mike Linksvayer, July 25th, 2008

Jamendo, a music site with over 10,000 CC-licensed albums, has teamed up with MP3tunes:

Give it a try at www.mp3tunes.com/jamendo - you’ll find 10 exclusive playlists of the best in rock, hip hop, jazz and more from Jamendo. Sign up for a Music Locker - it’s free to try - and then with a single click get each playlist you like added to your to your collection. You can also add personal music from your computer in your Locker with free, easy-to-use software.

This is very cool. Heavily curated playlists are one way to address the discovery problem. Using freely licensed music is how internet music startups can get the economics of all other internet startups. Unsaid in the announcement linked above, all of the playlisted tracks in the Jamendo/MP3tunes collaboration are licensed under CC BY-SA, allowing commercial use and recalling a recently posted quote from Lucas Gonze on commercial use and “empowering businesses to build support systems for your music.”

Creative Commons Salon NYC Followup

Fred Benenson, July 25th, 2008

Despite the humid weather Wednesday night, around 60 New Yorkers made it out to our July Salon at The Open Planning Project. After presentations from Livable Streets Network, Wikia Search and Max Silvestri’s hilarious Silvestri’s facebook foibles, we adjourned for pizza and beer on TOPP’s wonderful deck.

Check out my flickr photos from last night, and Nick Grossman from TOPP’s post on it here.

Many thanks go to The Open Planning Project and Brooklyn Brewery for supplying us cases of their beer. 

The next CC Salon NYC will be in mid-September, so look for the invite soon.

Upcoming ccSalon - SF

Melissa Reeder, July 24th, 2008

This time around, the SF Salon’s theme will focus on Creative Commons in the realm of film and media. We’ve got an all-star line-up of inspiring folks who will be talking about how CC and open and shared culture are all vital and exciting components of the media world. The night will start off with Jolene Pinder, an Associate Producer at Arts Engine, Inc. in NYC. Jolene will be screening a short CC-licensed film and talking about the various ways in which Arts Engine uses CC licenses. Next, CC’s very own Creative Director, Eric Steuer, will be talking about the soon to be launched film maker’s toolkit. And last but not least, Robin Sloan, Product Strategist from Current TV will wrap up the evening.

Mark your calendars for Wednesday, August 13, from 7-9pm.
The event will be held at Shine Bar in San Francisco.

We hope you will join us for what is sure to be an entertaining and memorable CC Salon!

The Case Studies Project Keeps Growing

Greg Grossmeier, July 24th, 2008

Only one month after the official release of the Case Studies project and already the response has been great! As you saw from my one week update the media response has also been very positive.

We aren’t resting on our laurels yet! There is more to be done but here is what is new:

• We are now up to over 110 case studies which is up from 90 when we publicly launched the project. Thanks to everyone who has helped and added case studies!
• With all of the activity going on in the Case Studies project it might seem hard to know what is going on. Not any more! We enabled a feature on the main page so you can see the last edited case studies.
• The future of the Case Studies project is looking great also. To see what is planned and what is already done check out the Case Studies Roadmap.
• Also, be sure to check out the new featured Studies on the main Case Studies page.

Again, a big thank you to everyone who has participated in the project thus far. There is always room for more contributors though!

Deerhoof & CASH Music team up for “Fresh Born” experiment

Eric Steuer, July 24th, 2008

One of my favorite bands, Deerhoof, has teamed up with innovative media company CASH Music (we’ve talked about CASH’s great work here, here, and here) for a very interesting project. In a sly nod to the ubiquity of pre-release music leaks, the group has issued the sheet music for its upcoming single “Fresh Born” under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license in advance of the October release of Offend Maggie, the band’s new album on Kill Rock Stars.

It’s a neat experiment in encouraging interactivity: Deerhoof’s recorded version of “Fresh Born” isn’t even available yet, but there are already several great recordings of the song - all made by other people - floating around online. Visit the CASH site for the most up-to-date collection of links to versions of the song. Lucas Gonze has made the music easier to work with digitally by retranscribing it with music notation software. Also, be sure to check out New York public radio station WNYC’s cool video of Deerhoof fans using their sight-reading abilities to collaboratively create a rendition of the song.

Incorporating content license information just made easier

Greg Grossmeier, July 23rd, 2008

Creative Commons has announced the release of two very important tools for the developer community. These tools, liblicense and LicenseChooser.js, provide simple and standard ways of reading or writing license information to a variety of files.

liblicense is specifically geared towards the desktop application developer who wants to use license information in media files but does not want to implement the low-level code themselves. LicenseChooser.js, however, is designed to be used in web applications such as a media sharing site for users’ pictures or music.

Both of these software packages aim to make the lives of the developers’ easier. One way in which that is accomplished is that these tools will continue to be updated as new versions of Creative Commons licenses are released thus moving the burden from the developer to Creative Commons.

There will be a public demonstration of liblicense at OSCON on July 24th. For more information see the Press Release.

Google Code adds content licensing; Google Knol launches with CC BY default

Mike Linksvayer, July 23rd, 2008

A Google twofer for Creative Commons today!

Google Knol opened today, intended to be a platform for authoritative articles about a specific topics, also known as knols, by a created single author or collaboratively. The default license for a new knol is CC Attribution. A creator can also choose CC Attribution-NonCommercial or All Rights Reserved.

Separately, Google Code added an option for software projects to specify a separate license for content associated with a software project — CC Attribution or CC Attribution-ShareAlike. This does not change Google Code’s selection of free and open source software licenses for source code. (Note: Creative Commons also recommends and uses free and open source software licenses such as the GNU GPL for source code.)

It’s really great to see both Google Knol and Google Code launching with and launching support for CC licensing on the same day, and interesting how their choice of licenses to offer differs. Knol defaults to the most liberal CC license, but allows authors to choose a more restrictive (NonCommercial) license, or even the most restrictive option — no public license.

As prior to its launch Knol was often speculatively compared to Wikipedia, it should be noted that the default Knol license (CC BY) could permit using Knol content in Wikipedia (with attribution of course), but knols under more restrictive options could not be incorporated into Wikipedia. On the other hand Wikipedia content could not be incorporated into knols (except in the case of fair use of course), even in the case Wikipedia migrates to CC BY-SA — Knol doesn’t offer a copyleft license.

The two CC licenses offered by Google Code are those that are in the spirit of free and open source software, befitting Google Code’s user base — free and open source software developers.