Thousands of Videos Featuring Musician Interviews Now Available Under CC’s Permissive Attribution License

New York, NY, USA and San Francisco, CA, USA — 03/09/2009

Today, Uncensored Interview, a video producer and licensor of musician interviews, announced a collaboration with Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization focused on building a body of openly shareable and reusable creative work, by releasing thousands of videos from its interview footage archive under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC-BY) license. Previously, Uncensored Interview’s library consisted of premium content available for commercial licensing, but now includes videos available via download in Ogg Theora, a free and open video compression format. Under CC-BY, users of the content are only required to give attribution to Uncensored Interview as the content source.

“This is a visionary move on the part of Uncensored Interview,” said Eric Steuer, creative director of Creative Commons. “By offering this vast and amazing body of work to the public under our most permissive license, the people behind Uncensored Interview are making a clear statement that allowing the sharing and creative reuse of material – even for commercial purposes – can enhance the value of that material for its creators. In promoting a “some rights reserved” approach to distribution, Uncensored Interview is opening up a wide variety of possibilities, and we’re very excited to see the kinds of projects that result from this pioneering effort.”

By working with Creative Commons, Uncensored Interview opens a direct line for fans to download, share, remix and promote select interview videos of their favorite artists. Uncensored Interview’s videos will be clearly marked as available via the CC license, while simultaneously providing a mechanism via the CC+ protocol for partners to seek out licensing permissions beyond those already granted.

“Consumers are not just consumers any more. They are creators and collaborators in their own right. By licensing our premium content under Creative Commons in Ogg Theora, we immediately enable use of our content as source material for online users while simultaneously promoting the artists and their points of view,” said Sander van Zoest, Chief Technology Officer for Uncensored Interview.

Many of the artists interviewed by Uncensored Interview are supporters of Creative Commons.

Gregg Gillis of Girl Talk said, “I think many people are starting to see the artistic and financial benefits of allowing their art and music to be appropriated and recontextualized. Creative Commons are making that whole process much easier.”

“Creativity is so often restricted by bureaucracy and financial matters. I think, CC can be a healthy solution for creative collaborations. It can help bridge the gap between the artist and fan, which I think would be a positive change”, said UK singer-songwriter Findlay Brown.

Uncensored Interview will release select interview videos under the Creative Commons license (CC-BY) on an ongoing basis. To download Uncensored Interview content, go to http://www.uncensoredinterview.com/topics/cc.

About Uncensored Interview

Uncensored Interview (http://www.uncensoredinterview.com), a subsidiary of ZenCat Productions, LLC, is a video production and licensing company focusing on the community of music artists and their fans. UI’s primary business is to produce interviews in a free-format style with musicians of all genres and license high-definition quality footage to partner companies. UI beta launched in November 2007 and has created distribution relationships with all areas of the music and digital industry, including broadcast networks, digital retail hubs, the music blogosphere, leading major and indie music labels and prominent music festivals and tours. Uncensored Interview has been recognized for many awards including the SXSW Interactive Web Awards and the Webby Awards. UI has interviewed hundreds of acclaimed acts including Stereolab, Hercules and Love Affair, The Kooks, Vivian Girls, The New Pornographers, Dizzee Rascal, Lykke Li and many more.

About Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain. Through its free copyright licenses, Creative Commons offers authors, artists, scientists, and educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to enable a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by the generous support of organizations including the Center for the Public Domain, Omidyar Network, The Rockefeller Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as well as members of the public. For more information about Creative Commons, visit https://creativecommons.org.

Contact

Melinda Lee
Chief Content Officer, Uncensored Interview
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Eric Steuer
Creative Director, Creative Commons
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