This week marks the launch of Creative Commons’ second annual fundraising campaign. Last year, we experienced phenomenal support from our community - with over $250,000 donated.

This year’s campaign boasts multiple ways to support CC. You can show your support directly - by making a donation and/or purchasing CC swag at our online store; or indirectly - by including a “Support CC 2006” button in your website, blog, etc. This year, we are offering a new T-shirt, new and improved vinyl stickers and hipster buttons. Check out the options at our new support pages.

Similar to last year’s campaign, our CEO & Chairman - Larry Lessig - will again be initiating the “Lessig Letters” series, but this time the twice-monthly emails will come from some of the Creative Commons international affiliates and will highlight the exciting things happening around CC licenses and tools in their jurisdictions. These letters will be sent to our mailing list so if you think that you may not be on it and wish to receive these emails please subscribe

For those of you who gave last year and wonder what your support achieved, below is a very brief overview:

Licenses:

• From January 2006 to July 2006 there was a growth from 40,000,000 to 140,000,000 linkbacks to our licenses!
• Creative Commons licenses were ported and launched in Bulgaria, Malaysia, Denmark, Mexico, Peru, Mainland China, Colombia and Malta.
• We initiated discussions about Version 3.0 of our licenses. The proposed Version 3.0 amendments clarify aspects of our licenses in response to important community feedback and, significantly, spin-off a US license and a treaty-based international license.

Community:

• We commenced the monthly CC Salon, which is a small get together for people interested in the ideas and issues surrounding CC and the global digital commons, here in San Francisco. This model spread virally and there are now Salons happening in Toronto, Berlin, Beijing, Warsaw, Seoul, Johannesburg, and coming soon in New York as well.
• Our ccMixter site continued to showcase the dynamism of remix communities. One of the remix tracks from ccMixter was included in the lonelygirl15 video phenomenon that swept the Internet and mainstream media. We also hosted various remix contests on the site including the Fort Minor Remix Contest and the Crammed Discs Remix Contest.
• We established a presence in Second Life, the 3D virtual space in which users can participate in building on the digital landscape and socializing within a market economy. We hosted various talks on the topic of free culture and copyright, showcased an in world remix art contest and, most recently, hosted a concert with Popular Science Magazine during which in world residents grooved to the beats of Melvin Took, Kourosh Eusebio, Etherian Kamaboko, Slim Warrior, Jaycatt Nico, Frogg Marlowe, Cylindrian Rutabaga and Jonathan Coulton. Second Life is unique among virtual worlds because it allows residents to own the rights to their own creations. Thanks to SL resident and Linden Lab staff member “Zarf Vantongerloo,” an in world Creative Commons license generator makes it possible for users to affix the appropriate legal code to their in-world creations that allows sharing and remixing.

Technology

• ccHost, the engine that powers ccMixter, has been developed to support all media types while retaining the key strengths of ccMixter - the ability to track the files’ genealogy. ccHost won the Linux World Product Excellence Award for “Best Open Source Solution in August 2006.
• ccPublisher 2.2 was refined and now has the capacity to make it easier for repository operators other than the Internet Archive to develop a customized version of ccPublisher that will upload works to another repository for hosting Creative Commons licensed work. There are currently 5 translations of ccPublisher that were developed by some of our volunteer international supporters - we can never thank you enough.
• In June 2006 Microsoft released a Creative Commons plug-in that can be downloaded and gives users of their Microsoft Office Suite the ability to CC-license their Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents.

That is just an overview of the many things your support has helped Creative Commons achieve over the past 12 months. Stay tuned to learn more about CC around the world and about what we have planned for the next 12 months that your continued support can help us realize.