Nina Paley’s Sita Sings The Blues, released online a little over two months ago, has been generating great press and even greater viewership, closing in on 70,000 downloads at archive.org alone. For the non-inundated, there is great background information on the film at Paley’s website.

We recently had the opportunity to talk with Paley about the film – we touched on the film’s aesthetics and plot points, but perhaps most interesting to those in the CC community is Paley’s decision to utilize our copyleft license, Attribution-ShareAlike, and her thoughts on free licensing and the open source movement in general. Read on to learn more about the licensing trials and tribulations associated with the film’s release, how CC has played a role, and Paley’s opinions on the Free Culture movement as a whole.

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Check out the latest ccNewsletter, available to download in PDF format for your reading pleasure as you catch up on the latest CC news. Note that from here out, the format of our newsletter will be changing slightly. We’ll send brief monthly e-news updates of the latest CC news, and on a quarterly basis, starting in September, we’ll produce a more comprehensive newsletter including a CEO update from Joi Ito, which will also be available in PDF format. We’ve got a lot of exciting things happening all the time, and we want to be sure to bring all of our big news to you in the most convenient way possible!

As always, thank you to our CC Philippines team for the beautiful PDF version of the newsletter. Check out all the past issues.

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Last month, a bipartisan bill introduced in the U.S. Senate recognized the fact that students learning today need to be taught the necessary skills to succeed in this century—an age of new media, the Internet, and ever evolving technologies. The bill, introduced by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, would “create a new incentive fund that will encourage States to adopt the 21st Century Skills Framework.” The fund would provide federal matches to those states that integrate the teaching of 21st century skills such as “creativity, innovation, critical thinking and financial, economic, business and entrepreneurial literacy” into core curricula, according to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.

eSchool News reports what Shelley Pasnik, “director of the Education Development Center’s Center for Children and Technology,” has to say:

“The legislation goes beyond technology. It’s about implementing a framework for 21st-century learning,” she said. “It’s more promising this way. If it were just about technology purchases, it would be a missed opportunity.”

We couldn’t agree more. Giving a student a computer won’t teach him or her how to use one, but integrating activities that require the use of one will. More broadly, students will learn the relevant skills to succeed in the current day and future when core curriculum is revamped to include current day and future projects. Revamped curriculum and associated learning materials will also only achieve maximum impact if the resources are open for use and iteration. Opening up the resources makes the federal investment worthwhile, and is helpful for states that are slow in jumping on the bandwagon to catch up. It also gives extra incentive for high quality materials, as competition turns to collaboration between states.

You can read the full text of the proposed bill here.

We hosted our second community conference call last Wednesday, May 27. Donors were invited to join members of CC’s staff and board, including CEO Joi Ito and new Board Chair Esther Wojcicki, to discuss organizational updates, including CC Zero, GreenXchange, the future of the CC Network, and an update on the Wikipedia migration to CC BY-SA. We also took questions and comments from participants. The call was a great success and a valuable opportunity to reach out to and connect with our supporters; we will continue to host community conference calls on a quarterly basis, and anyone giving $250 or more will be invited to take part.

An audio recording of the call is now available online. Thanks to everyone who participated, and as always, we would like to extend a big thank you to all members of our community for your continued support!

PALM Africa, an African CC-based publishing project, just released their first open-access book from AIDS specialist Peter Mugyenyi titled, Genocide by Denial: How profiteering from HIV/AIDS killed millions. The book is being released under a CC BY-NC-ND license making it free to download and share. PALM is using the release to test the impact open access initiatives have on book sales but, as noted by Eve Gray, there is another reason this license choice is so important (emphasis added):

The timing is impeccable, as the release of the open access version of the book coincides exactly with a breakthrough at the World Health Organisation, which has finally reached agreement on a global strategy and plan of action on public health, innovation and intellectual property […] Among the recommendations in the WHO plan of action is government intervention to ensure voluntary sharing or research, open access publication repositories and open databases and compound libraries of medical research results. Thus Fountain’s engagement with open access publishing on a public health topic is right in line with – and ahead of – developing global policy.

PALM and Mugyenyi’s license choice thus becomes a practice in the very lessons they are attempting to teach. Beyond this, Gray argues that “Mugyenyi’s book needs to be read by the South African bureaucrats who are trying to enforce widespread and rigid commercialization of public research”, a task that while difficult, is made easier due to the free sharing encouraged by their license choice.

Creative Commons is working with Steiner, Neyman, & Partners LLC to create Russia jurisdiction-specific licenses from the generic Creative Commons licenses.

CCi Russia List

Legal Project Lead: Leyla Neyman (Steiner, Neyman, & Partners LLC)

Project Adviser: Syb Groeneveld

• Subscribe to the discussion
• Read the discussion archives

More about Steiner, Neyman, & Partners LLC

STEINER, NEYMAN & PARTNERS is an adviser for companies entering or already involved in new media business and related intellectual property matters. The firm provides legal services in both English and Russian, which ensures highest quality level of their work and its worldwide recognition.

The firm focuses on New Media business sectors such as telecommunications, multimedia, TV & radio broadcasting, Web media, software development, and IT infrastructure and service providers.

Specializations include Intellectual Property (including copyright) and content clearance, registration and enforcement litigation, arbitration and mediation, as well as legal support for new media projects, and consulting legal opinions on mew media.

First CC Russia Roundtable

Held on Moscow, 9 September 2008 to discuss next steps for license porting in Russia

• Roundtable Minutes (.pdf)
• Announcement on CC weblog: First Roundtable Creative Commons Russia

FrostWire has been quietly promoting Creative Commons licensed musicians and content on the front page of their Bit Torrent and Gnutella client for quite a while now. Previous featured CC artists include ESPSIX, Mike Falzone, and CC veteran Brad Sucks.

Today the team announced that another up and coming artist, Danny “Legacy” Mcbride, is releasing his new album under our Attribution-NoDerivatives license so he can be featured on FrostWire. This was a smart choice for Legacy (and all of the highlighted musicians) as FrostWire boasts millions of active users which helps them garner substantial exposure they might not otherwise would have received.

Kudos to FrostWire for taking the proactive step of encouraging legal filesharing with CC in an otherwise murky climate. Check out the FrostClick blog for more featured artists and downloads.

Jonathan Bailey at PlagiarismToday has a great post dissecting the various issues raised by the bizarre “WE ARE COPYRIGHTED BLOGS” license he recently came across. Jonathan correctly recommends that you leave it to the professionals (Creative Commons is a good example 🙂 to draft your copyright licenses:

This license displays some of the many hazards that people face when they try to craft their own copyright licenses. This is why, whenever possible, you should either use an “All Rights Reserved” license and grant permissions on a case-by-case basis, use a Creative Commons or other license that has been vetted and written by professionals or [an]other license that has been vetted and written by professionals.

And remember kids, just say NO to license proliferation.

When it comes to copyright, our youth are too often bombarded with extremes. The entertainment industry giants propagate a skewed perspective by launching anti-copying educational programs, leaving out much of the balanced information necessary to cultivating user’s awareness about her real rights to a resource. This results in students thinking that they can react in only one of two ways: by breaking the law in the face of overbearing restrictions, or by doing absolutely nothing at all with copyrighted works, effectively stifling the learning that comes of creatively engaging with them.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation recognized this problem and went to work on a copyright curriculum that would not only be fair and balanced in perspective, but comprehensive in its scope by encouraging discussion and self-education. From the press release,

“Kids are bombarded with messages that using new technology is illegal… Instead of approaching the issues from a position of fear, Teaching Copyright encourages inquiry and greater understanding. This is a balanced curriculum, asking students to think about their role in the online world and to make informed choices about their behavior.”

ccLearn has taken a look at Teaching Copyright and we commend it. The curriculum is created and vetted by lawyers and promotes a balanced teaching perspective, clearing up much of the misinformation that is current industry propaganda. Like EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry says, “Today’s tech-savvy teens will grow into the artists and innovators of tomorrow.” We need to help them “understand their digital rights and responsibilities in order to create, critique, and comment on their culture. This curriculum fills an educational void, introducing critical questions of digital citizenship into the classroom without misinformation that scares kids from expressing themselves in the modern world.”

The entire curriculum and accompanying resources on the Teaching Copyright website are licensed CC BY, which appropriately encourages students, teachers, and anyone else to adapt it to various educational needs and contexts.

To take maximum advantage of Wikipedia’s migration to CC Attribution-ShareAlike, other wikis licensed under the GFDL should, where possible, migrate to CC BY-SA before the deadline set by the GFDL version 1.3 — August 1st.

Ideally all works under free (as in freedom) licenses should be freely remixable, greatly increasing the pull of the Free universe. Wikipedia’s adoption of CC BY-SA goes a long way toward that goal, and each additional wiki that can migrate by the deadline helps even more.

Benjamin Mako Hill (Wikipedian, Free Software Foundation board member, and one of the people crucial to making the migration possible) writes on the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list:

As the group with the most to lose and as the group that introduced the change at issue, the foundation and its broader community should devote as much time as possible to this issue in the next two months before it is too late.

I’m happy to see that work is already being coordinated here:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update/Outreach

As many people as possible should join in this effort and spread the word.

Here are some ways you can help:

• Know of a GFDL licensed wiki not on the outreach list? Add it.
• Participate in one of the wikis on the list? Help that wiki migrate, even just by alerting its community to the importance of migration.
• Want to volunteer to help but aren’t sure where to start, or have other questions? Leave a note on the outreach talk page.
• Spread the word about this effort to others who might be able to do one of the above.

It’s also worth noting that the outreach page calls out Appropedia as an example to follow. Appropedia actually took advantage of the GFDL 1.3 to migrate to CC BY-SA before the Wikipedia community vote concluded, and is an excellent and innovative wiki and community unto itself, focusing on appropriate technology for “collaborative solutions in sustainability, poverty reduction and international development.”

Thanks to everyone who has and will help move this distributed free culture optimization procedure forward!