At the turn of 2004, we laid out our New Year’s Resolutions for Creative Commons. The year’s not quite up, but I’m going offline soon, so I thought it would be a good time to check in on our progress. I’m happy to report that the state of the Commons is strong. (If I personally had accomplished this many of my own New Year’s Resolutions this year, I’d be a rich, talented, patient, cancer-curing, movie star-dating, Pulitzer-winning upstanding citizen by now. As it is . . . there’s always next year.)

Make worry-free sampling and re-creativity mainstream.

Sixteen sampling-friendly tunes — including the Beastie Boys, David Byrne, Gilberto Gil, Chuck D and more — on the cover of WIRED magazine is a good start, yes?

Make 25 country-specific sets of iCommons licenses available.

Right now we offer 11, and by the end of the January we’ll offer 14. Another 12-15 are poised to go live very soon. Given that the 25-country figure was a little bit nuts (2 sets of licenses per month), iCommons progress has been a massive success and easily one of the most exciting things we’ve done. Hats off to Christiane, Roland, and all the iCommons volunteers worldwide.

Explore Science Commons.

Underway. Much more coming at the turn of 2005.

Version licenses.

Done, and thanks to you, a huge improvement.

Begin Save-a-Book campaign, revive out-of-print books.

This got shelved for the time being, though some planning has gotten underway.

Debut metadata search engine prototype.

Done. And it ships with the amazing Firefox browser. We are all indebted to Mike, Neeru, Matt, and Nutch.org.

Unveil CC-Mixter — Friendster for musicians.

Done, and on the verge of some very cool applications — watch this space this week.

Launch “Anatomy of a Film” project.

Done. More interesting uses of this approach soon.

Build licenses into at least two applications per medium: photography, audio, film, text. (Adobe XMP plug-in to debut soon.)

Let’s see: Flickr, SnapGallery, Moveable Type, Squarespace, Manila, Archive.org, YMDI, Ticketstubs, WinkSite, plus DMusic, Soundclick, Garageband.com, and others I’m sure I’ve forgotten. Great progress thanks to the tech team and Neeru.

Make “some rights reserved” household phrase.

Not quite household, but 800,000 Google hits isn’t too bad.

We’ll put up our 2005 Resolutions just after the New Year.