Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization focused on building a body of openly shareable and reusable creative work, today announced the launch of its 2008 fundraising campaign. Information about how to support Creative Commons is available at http://support.creativecommons.org/.

To celebrate the campaign, Creative Commons today released “A Shared Culture,” a short video by renowned filmmaker Jesse Dylan. Known for helming a variety of films, music videos, and the Emmy Award-winning “Yes We Can” Barack Obama campaign video collaboration with rapper will.i.am, Dylan created “A Shared Culture” to help spread the word about the Creative Commons mission. The video is available online to watch and download at https://creativecommons.org/asharedculture.

In the video, some of the leading thinkers behind Creative Commons describe how the organization is helping “save the world from failed sharing” through free tools that enable creators to easily make their work available to the public for legal sharing and remix. Dylan puts the Creative Commons system into action by punctuating the interview footage with dozens of photos that have been offered to the public for use under CC licenses. Similarly, he used two CC-licensed instrumental pieces by Nine Inch Nails as the video’s soundtrack music. These tracks, “17 Ghosts II” and “21 Ghosts III,” come from the Nine Inch Nails album Ghosts I-IV, which was released earlier this year under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.

“I wanted to give people a clear understanding of how Creative Commons works and why it’s an important system,” says Dylan. “I think the best way to do that is by actually putting to use some of the great stuff that’s been made available to the world under CC licenses. The images and music in the video were made by people all around the world who chose to publish their work in a way that says ‘Hey, see this thing I made? You can take it and use it to make something else. I’m giving you the legal right to use it, because I don’t think that copyright should be something that stands in the way of creativity.’ Without the amazing work of Nine Inch Nails and all of the photographers whose images I used, this kind of video simply wouldn’t have been possible to make.”

“A Shared Culture” is released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, meaning that anyone in the world can legally share, use, and remix it, as long as they abide by the license’s conditions. (The terms of the BY-NC-SA license are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). On its website and via LegalTorrents, Creative Commons has offered the video in several formats (ranging from Quicktime to Ogg Theora) and has provided photographer attribution through ImageStamper.

As part of the fundraising campaign, Creative Commons is calling on members of the public to use “A Shared Culture” as the basis for other videos that describe how CC licenses have enabled legal access, collaboration, and participation around the world.

“We hope that Jesse Dylan’s amazing video is just the first in a vast collection of videos and projects that address the idea of ‘A Shared Culture,’” says Joi Ito, Creative Commons’ CEO. “Take what Jesse has done and use it to make your own video. There are millions of CC-licensed songs, images, and video clips out there that you can use. Shoot some of your own interview footage that features your friends and people in your local communities talking about these issues. Take everything that you have at hand and use it to create, customize, remix, and share. Show the world that copyright should be a tool for fostering innovation, and not a barrier to creative progress.”

“We’re thrilled that Jesse made this amazing video to show the strength and importance of Creative Commons,” says Melissa Reeder, Creative Commons’ development manager. “We hope it inspires the public to create their own work, to use CC-licenses, and support Creative Commons financially during our fundraising drive and beyond.”

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

Eric Steuer
Creative Director, Creative Commons
eric at creativecommons dot org

Melissa Reeder
Development Manager, Creative Commons
melissa at creativecommons dot org

Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization focused on building a body of openly shareable and reusable creative work, today announced the launch of its 2008 fundraising campaign. Information about how to support Creative Commons is available at http://support.creativecommons.org/.

To celebrate the campaign, Creative Commons today released “A Shared Culture,” a short video by renowned filmmaker Jesse Dylan. Known for helming a variety of films, music videos, and the Emmy Award-winning “Yes We Can” Barack Obama campaign video collaboration with rapper will.i.am, Dylan created “A Shared Culture” to help spread the word about the Creative Commons mission. The video is available online to watch and download at https://creativecommons.org/asharedculture.

In the video, some of the leading thinkers behind Creative Commons describe how the organization is helping “save the world from failed sharing” through free tools that enable creators to easily make their work available to the public for legal sharing and remix. Dylan puts the Creative Commons system into action by punctuating the interview footage with dozens of photos that have been offered to the public for use under CC licenses. Similarly, he used two CC-licensed instrumental pieces by Nine Inch Nails as the video’s soundtrack music. These tracks, “17 Ghosts II” and “21 Ghosts III,” come from the Nine Inch Nails album Ghosts I-IV, which was released earlier this year under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.

“I wanted to give people a clear understanding of how Creative Commons works and why it’s an important system,” says Dylan. “I think the best way to do that is by actually putting to use some of the great stuff that’s been made available to the world under CC licenses. The images and music in the video were made by people all around the world who chose to publish their work in a way that says ‘Hey, see this thing I made? You can take it and use it to make something else. I’m giving you the legal right to use it, because I don’t think that copyright should be something that stands in the way of creativity.’ Without the amazing work of Nine Inch Nails and all of the photographers whose images I used, this kind of video simply wouldn’t have been possible to make.”

“A Shared Culture” is released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, meaning that anyone in the world can legally share, use, and remix it, as long as they abide by the license’s conditions. (The terms of the BY-NC-SA license are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). On its website and via LegalTorrents, Creative Commons has offered the video in several formats (ranging from Quicktime to Ogg Theora) and has provided photographer attribution through ImageStamper.

As part of the fundraising campaign, Creative Commons is calling on members of the public to use “A Shared Culture” as the basis for other videos that describe how CC licenses have enabled legal access, collaboration, and participation around the world.

“We hope that Jesse Dylan’s amazing video is just the first in a vast collection of videos and projects that address the idea of ‘A Shared Culture,’” says Joi Ito, Creative Commons’ CEO. “Take what Jesse has done and use it to make your own video. There are millions of CC-licensed songs, images, and video clips out there that you can use. Shoot some of your own interview footage that features your friends and people in your local communities talking about these issues. Take everything that you have at hand and use it to create, customize, remix, and share. Show the world that copyright should be a tool for fostering innovation, and not a barrier to creative progress.”

“We’re thrilled that Jesse made this amazing video to show the strength and importance of Creative Commons,” says Melissa Reeder, Creative Commons’ development manager. “We hope it inspires the public to create their own work, to use CC-licenses, and support Creative Commons financially during our fundraising drive and beyond.”

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

Eric Steuer
Creative Director, Creative Commons
eric at creativecommons dot org

Melissa Reeder
Development Manager, Creative Commons
melissa at creativecommons dot org

The Geograph British Isles project, which aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometer of Great Britain and Ireland, announced today that they have recieved their 1 millionth image submission. All images are licensed under a CC BY-SA license, meaning the images can be shared and reused as long as the author(s) are properly attributed and any derivative works are shared under the same license.

The White Lyne | David Liddle, CC BY-SA

Just three months ago, we were praising the GBI project’s effort to release torrents of their image database, which then totaled 860,000 images. Congrats to the GBI project on this huge milestone – read more about their project here, including their well articulated points on the benefits of remaining free and open.

Today Creative Commons launched the Creative Commons Network, as part of their annual fundraising campaign.

The CC Network offers users a profile and web badge, providing a means to express support of Creative Commons. The site also acts as a testbed for digital copyright registry technology. CC Network users may list their Creative Commons licensed works on their CC Network profile. The profile and web badge include metadata corresponding to the license used, allowing applications to consume information about the provenance of licensed works and licensors. Creative Commons’ own website is one such application and now displays provenance information on license web pages if available.

Creative Commons CTO Nathan Yergler said “The CC Network is where the semantic rubber meets the web road”, referring to the high expectations and underwhelming adoption of Semantic Web technologies. Yergler continued “With the CC Network we’re leveraging everything we’ve learned over the past five years about metadata on the web, including the new RDFa standard, along with the work of many other groups, including FOAF, POWDER, and SIOC.”

CC Network accounts also come with an OpenID login, allowing users to login to sites that support OpenID via a trusted provider. The CC Network aims to raise the bar for OpenID providers by taking all steps necessary to protect users’ privacy. “An OpenID provider knows every site a user logs into via OpenID, so it is important for a user to be able to trust their OpenID provider. We hope users think Creative Commons is trustworthy, but we’re also taking steps to bake user protections into the CC Network’s OpenID provider implementation, from the technology to terms of service to explanation of the risks and benefits to users” said security expert Ben Adida, a technology advisor to Creative Commons.

All of the standards the CC Network builds on are open, and the code that runs the site is free software. “The CC Network launch is a step toward a system of interoperable digital copyright registries as open as the web itself. Open registries allow users to discover more information about who’s licensing content, and as such are a necessary complement to our open copyright licenses” explained Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito.

CC Network accounts are offered as a benefit for annual CC supporters at a level of $50 or above ($25 for students). Creative Commons’ annual fundraising campaign, themed “Build the Commons”, has a goal of raising $500,000 as well as encouraging CC supporters to lead by example, educate others about the value of the CC approach to openness and access, and to help launch the CC Network.

Please visit the Build the Commons campaign webpage, for more information.

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, please visit the Creative Commons’ website.

Contact

Melissa Reeder, Development Manager, Creative Commons,
melissa@creativecommons.org

Press Kit

Today Creative Commons launched the Creative Commons Network, as part of their annual fundraising campaign.

The CC Network offers users a profile and web badge, providing a means to express support of Creative Commons. The site also acts as a testbed for digital copyright registry technology. CC Network users may list their Creative Commons licensed works on their CC Network profile. The profile and web badge include metadata corresponding to the license used, allowing applications to consume information about the provenance of licensed works and licensors. Creative Commons’ own website is one such application and now displays provenance information on license web pages if available.

Creative Commons CTO Nathan Yergler said “The CC Network is where the semantic rubber meets the web road”, referring to the high expectations and underwhelming adoption of Semantic Web technologies. Yergler continued “With the CC Network we’re leveraging everything we’ve learned over the past five years about metadata on the web, including the new RDFa standard, along with the work of many other groups, including FOAF, POWDER, and SIOC.”

CC Network accounts also come with an OpenID login, allowing users to login to sites that support OpenID via a trusted provider. The CC Network aims to raise the bar for OpenID providers by taking all steps necessary to protect users’ privacy. “An OpenID provider knows every site a user logs into via OpenID, so it is important for a user to be able to trust their OpenID provider. We hope users think Creative Commons is trustworthy, but we’re also taking steps to bake user protections into the CC Network’s OpenID provider implementation, from the technology to terms of service to explanation of the risks and benefits to users” said security expert Ben Adida, a technology advisor to Creative Commons.

All of the standards the CC Network builds on are open, and the code that runs the site is free software. “The CC Network launch is a step toward a system of interoperable digital copyright registries as open as the web itself. Open registries allow users to discover more information about who’s licensing content, and as such are a necessary complement to our open copyright licenses” explained Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito.

CC Network accounts are offered as a benefit for annual CC supporters at a level of $50 or above ($25 for students). Creative Commons’ annual fundraising campaign, themed “Build the Commons”, has a goal of raising $500,000 as well as encouraging CC supporters to lead by example, educate others about the value of the CC approach to openness and access, and to help launch the CC Network.

Please visit the Build the Commons campaign webpage, for more information.

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, please visit the Creative Commons’ website.

Contact

Melissa Reeder, Development Manager, Creative Commons,
melissa@creativecommons.org

Press Kit

In the wave of free culture gatherings this October, don’t miss out on the Nordic Cultural Commons Conference 2008, in Stockholm on October 22-23, organized by the Creative Commons Nordic network.

How is business created around open licensing? What benefits does the Creative Commons model provide for public broadcasting and archiving? How open licensing changes the production of cultural works? How does the common Nordic legal environment affect re-use of cultural works?

Nordic Cultural Commons Conference provides insight into these questions. Bringing together all Nordic Creative Commons scholars and practitioners, it is also a great opportunity to meet and discuss the latest open content practices and ideas.

Speakers include Mike Linksvayer (Creative Commons), John Buckman (Magnatune), Nicklas Lundblad (Google) and Paul Gerhardt (BBC Creative Archive), as well as Creative Commons Project Leads Henrik Moltke (CC Denmark), Prodromos Tsiavos (CC England & Wales), and Herkko Hietanen (CC Finland).

For more information, please visit the conference web site: http://www.hiit.fi/nccc/.

IBM, outside of their endeavors in personal computing and technology, is an active participant in the world of open source technology. It should come as no surprise then that IBM has an article on their website titled Mastering the Creative Commons. Filed in their “Web Development | Open Source” series, Uche Ogbuji does a nice job summing up what CC does:

Creative Commons (CC) is an organization of lawyers, technical experts, and managers, with a very broad community, whose goal is to “use private rights to create public goods”, by allowing creators to express degrees of licensing between the knee-jerk “all rights reserved” and public domain (in other words, “no rights reserved”). Creative Commons provides the legal framework and text of licenses that allow you to say that “some rights are reserved”, and allows this to be clearly discovered by others, so that they can determine whether their use is compatible with your reservations. The lawyers are involved when these reusable licenses are crafted and updated, with support and feedback from the community, with the idea that afterwards, the sharing can proceed on the Web with much less legal interference. In this article, learn how to express CC licenses for your work, how to use public services for finding work from others you can use, and how to identify such work yourself.

The article explains what our licenses do, how to license a work under CC, how to indicate that a work is CC-licensed (including a discussion of RDFa), and how to find CC-licensed works. While the article is available online and as a free PDF download, it is unfortunately not under a CC license. Regardless, it is great to see an organization like IBM support CC accurately and whole heartedly like this.

Creative Commons is working with the New Media Center at the Universidad Francisco Marroquin to create jurisdiction-specific licenses for Guatemala from the “unported” Creative Commons licenses.

CCi Guatemala List

Project Lead: Renata Avila, LL.M.

• License draft (PDF).
• English re-translation of the draft (PDF).
• English explanation of substantive legal changes (PDF).
• Post a message.
• Subscribe to the discussion.
• Read the discussion archives.

More about the New Media Center at the Universidad Francisco Marroquin

Conceived in 2001, the New Media department at UFM was created to assist faculty members, researchers, and students in the use, creation, and management of digital resources that complement their academic work. And, due to the improvements in IT infrastructure and user expertise as well as advances in Internet enabled teaching, it became clear that the role of the New Media department would be twofold. Firstly, the department preserves and makes the university’s unique collection of VHS and ¾” films available through digitization and conversion to Internet compatible formats to increase access and use. Secondly, the New Media department has digitized and streamed classes, conferences and lectures held at UFM over the Internet in order to preserve this locally produced content, but also to support university distance learning. We actively assist departments and professors who wish to incorporate digital media into their courses by teaching various short courses in video and multimedia production. Additionally, we include many technical and academic value added features to the digital video, such as indexes,slides, and lecture notes. These developments permit greater faculty and student participation in the creation and use of teaching resources and mean that digital video is becoming an important tool in the provision of course material at UFM.

For more information, please visit http://newmedia.ufm.edu/.

Netwaves Records, a netlabel that focuses on genre-oriented compilations, just released their first album, Electro 1. Focusing on music that ranges from “electro-pop” to “electro-clash”, Electro 1 has been released under a CC BY-NC-SA license. this means it can be freely shared and remixed as long as proper attribution is given, the resulting and original works are not sold, and any derivative works are shared under the same license. Download it here for weekend listening.

flickrleech is a great tool for those looking to search a large number of flickr photos at once – by utilizing Flickr’s API, flickrleech is able to display 200 images per page rather than the standard 10. As pointed out by Alvin Trusty, it simply “makes scanning for a picture much quicker.”

While flickrleech has been around for a while, a new update has added the ability to search for photos by CC license. For those who scour Flickr searching for the perfect CC-licensed image, this functionality should mean less time spent searching and an immediately wider selection to choose from. Check it out for yourself here.