Translating Creative Commons animations

Matt Haughey, March 29th, 2004

Several of our iCommons partner groups have asked if they could translate our movies, Get Creative and Reticulum Rex into other languages. Thanks to the licenses we applied on each movie, those are definitely allowed and we’d like to encourage others to contribute to this effort. Towards that end, we’ve put up all the raw audio, script, and flash files for translation purposes.

Internet helping record sales?

Matt Haughey, March 29th, 2004

Ran across a couple interesting bits related to musicians having their songs online and record sales.

In a roundtable interview with the Chicago Tribune (registration required to view), Creative Commons chairman Lawrence Lessig and the online manager of the band Wilco talk about the internet and music. The gist of is that putting Wilco’s music online helped them sell more records and greatly increase attendance at their live shows.

Cory Doctorow points at a recent Cato Institute study (PDF) that shows popular searches on a P2P network didn’t correlate with lower sales.

Chicago Tribune

Press Robot, March 29th, 2004

“Copyfight” interview by Chicago Tribune

dadaIMC codebase used by Independent Media Centers supports CC

Neeru Paharia, March 26th, 2004

dadaIMC, a content management system that offer a codebase for the operation of Independent Media Center sites, now supports Creative Commons licenses for users uploading content to the system. There are currently twenty eight Independent Media Center sites that run on dadaIMC.

Independent Media Centers, like the one in Baltimore, are based on a philosophy of open publishing. Their newswire is open to public use, and anyone can post articles, audio, video, or images to the site. The interface for posting media includes
a section for selecting between
copyright, public domain, or any of the Creative Commons licenses. dadaIMC has also innovated to offer a new logo that explicity signals the allowance of derivative works, something our current license engine doesn’t support.

Winksite adds CC to mobile blogging

Matt Haughey, March 26th, 2004

Winksite is a popular mobile blogging application that lets you both post to a blog from your phone or PDA and read other blogs, in addition to a slew of other community tools. They’ve recently added Creative Commons support for blogs hosted on the service, so you can make it clear to readers how your content is licensed.

Creative Commons expanding to Australia and Jordan

Matt Haughey, March 26th, 2004

Today Creative Commons has begun discussion of licenses in Australia and Jordan. Professors at Queensland University of Technology and law firm Blake Dawson Waldron Lawyers will be helping out on the Australian efforts while Jordan’s licenses will benefit from the folks at Abu-Ghazaleh Intellectual Property. Those wishing to join the discussion can find the links here and here.

Free Culture released

Matt Haughey, March 25th, 2004

Creative Commons chairman Lawrence Lessig has just released his new book, Free Culture today, both online as a licensed downloadable PDF and in stores. The book covers the current state of copyright law and what it means to our culture and society. Give it a look, and if you like what you see, ordering online will contribute a small percentage of this organization.

Full-Time Intimacy

Glenn Otis Brown, March 25th, 2004

The Berkman Center’s Mary Bridges and Benjamen Walker — the sound designer behind Creative Commons’ animations — recently produced an audio postcard for NPR on the SXSW Interactive conference. It’s subtly funny, and a nice self-exemplifying piece of, and about, instant bricolage media. (Listen closely for the voices of Creative Commons board member Joi Ito and Mediarights.org tech chief and Fourth Wall Films panelist David Jacobs.)

Liberation (France)

Press Robot, March 24th, 2004

“Trois Questions a Glenn Otis Brown,” by Marie Lechner.

SoundShelf.com offers CC for music

Neeru Paharia, March 24th, 2004

SoundShelf.com hosts free music of various genres and makes it all available under the EFF Open Audio License, or a Creative Commons license. This was taken directly from their FAQ:

2. When is free music legal?

Free music is legal when the artists want it to be. Until recently it was near impossible to know the artist’s feelings and intentions as all works were automatically copyrighted. Today with the emergence of the Creative Commons License and the EFF Open Audio License the artist’s desired intentions are expressed by the license that they choose to publish their works under.

I particulary liked this track No More by Neoismo, a group based out of Italy. It’s under an Attribution-ShareAlike license so you can even remix it!