Cory Doctorow points us to a great post by EFF’s International Outreach Coordinator Danny O’Brien (NOTE: O’Brien didn’t write the article on behalf of EFF, rather on his own time on a personal blog) on the cultural difference between ‘attribution’ and ‘copying’ on the Internet. O’Brien makes the astute point that while copying is relatively uncontroversial to most web-users, lack of proper attribution is widely considered web-sacrilege. Doctorow accurately relates O’Brien’s argument to our original CC-licences, which had the ability for users to pass over the Attribution clause. We did away with that choice in version 2.0, as 97%-98% of users were choosing to use licenses that included our BY clause. From O’Brien’s piece “Copyright, Fraud and Window Taxes (No, not that Windows)“:

In a digital world, many people don’t see the act of copying as a particularly momentous or profitable event. Copying isn’t what we do as an act of purchasing; copying is a thing we do to our valuable artifacts. People are scandalised when its suggested that you should pay for a copy copied to backup drives, or iPods; they’re amazed when vested interests demand that cached copies or transitory files should count as extra purchases. Copying is no longer a good proxy for incoming revenue; which means it is no longer a good place to extract remuneration […] Nowadays, copying isn’t always the core part of remunerative creative business. But accurate accreditation very much is.

Of course we have our Public Domain Declaration for anyone who wishes to give a work directly to the commons without wanting attribution. This aside, O’Brien’s piece is a salient observation on the cultural language of the web – as the CC community has shown, many are ready to give their content away more freely but not without the cultural currency of proper accreditation. For more reading, head to the comments section at the BB post for a good discussion of how O’Brien’s argument functions in regards to proper attribution and ‘moral rights‘.

(UPDATED 8/11/08)

SXSW, the popular music-interactive-film mega-conference in Austin Texas has launched their interactive panel picker. Eric and I proposed a number of panels that we think would make for good sessions. But we need your help to make them happen in 2009. Please visit the panel picker, read our panel descriptions, and create an account to vote for them!

Here are the direct links to our proposed panels for your clicking pleasure:

• DRM: The Fight Isn’t Over Yet
• Did You Get Ripped Off? Understanding Appropriation
• Dusty Jackets: Does Anyone Buy Physical Media Anymore?
• Non-Profit Technology Work: How You Can Do Good

Either way, mark your calendars for March 13th-17th and we’ll see you there.

Thanks to the great work of Asheesh Laroia, Software Engineer here at Creative Commons, the libLicense software package is now available for software developers. The new package can now be found in both Debian and Ubuntu (development versions) and will be in Fedora soon.

That is all well and good, but what does it mean for you and what can you do (as a developer)?

• First, try it! Tell us what you think of its functionality and interface.
• Secondly, integrate it into your application. There is interest in getting it into Inkscape, the Open Source vector graphics editor.
• Finally, you can help us improve our test cases. Read more about this in Asheesh’s email.

This is a great time to add Creative Commons licensing awareness to your applications.

Watch the interview with Asheesh Laroia about liblicense on blip.tv.

The Indie Band Survival Guide, originally released as a CC-licensed PDF, has gone professional with a recent pressing in physical form. Written by Randy Chertkow and Jason Feehan (otherwise known as Chicago-based band Beatnik Turtle), the book explores the ability for indie bands to be successful on their own, without the help of a major recording deal, in the current music industry.

The book and ideas therein are wrapped in a variety of CC layers. Chertkow and Feehan, both in the original PDF and in the book, recommend using CC licences as a means for musicians to spread their works far and wide, referencing the oft-cited Tim O’Reilly quote, “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.” To Chertkow and Feehan, CC licensing music makes sense as a promotional tool, increasing the ability for an artist to gain exposure and fans.

Recommendation aside, The Indie Band Survival Guide garnered popularity and traction through the initial decision to license the text under a CC BY-NC-SA license. Through this exposure, Chertkow and Feehan were able to hookup with St. Martin’s Press and work out a publishing deal, eventually producing a major rewrite that includes a variety of information not available online. Although the book itself is not CC-licensed (it is often hard for first time authors to leverage such agreements from their publishing companies) the PDF remains free and available online and isn’t lacking in information, coming in at over 50,000 words.

Check out the PDF and if you are a DIY musician, seriously consider picking up the print version – beyond its endorsement of CC it is full of useful knowledge on the intricacies of the music industry.

Michael Wesch, creator of the strikingly insightful videos “A Vision of Students Today” and “The Machine is Us/ing Us”, gave a presentation at the Library of Congress back in May on the anthropology of YouTube. The presentation was the third in a series called “Digital Natives,” natives being basically my and probably your generation if you’re reading this. It’s about the net and the people who grew up with a computer humming by their bed stands. Wesch delves into this phenomenon that is us—how we think and how we perceive and connect with the world differently due to the internet and new media like YouTube. 

“An anthropological introduction to YouTube” is where “traditional” academic research and the new media landscape intersect. It is the anthropological perspective and study of our generation’s fascination with YouTube, and is itself viewable on Wesch’s YouTube page. Check it out; I started watching it and couldn’t stop. The fifty-five minutes flew by like a lunch break. The video itself is licensed CC BY-NC-SA.

When I was a kid, the only dictionary around the house was a monumental hardcover my little brother used as a stool to reach the cookie jar. We hardly ever looked inside of it, and when we did, we couldn’t find any words used in the real world. It was the super duper collegiate university fifth edition, or something like that. Later, my brother might’ve used it as a substitute for weight class…

Point being, a new project speaking to this situation was recently launched by Karen Fasimpaur and Brad Emerson, along with a host of collaborators. The Kids Open Dictionary Builder is a new wiki-style dictionary intended especially for kids who want to be able to read simple definitions of real world terms. Of course, the dictionary can be used by anyone: students of all ages, teachers, publishers and more. All content will be contributions to the public domain, free for anyone to use, modify and repurpose. From their FAQ page:

“We want this resource to be as sharable as possible, and while we think sharing is good, we don’t feel compelled to force others to share. The more learners around the world who benefit from this, the better. We want people to to mix and mash up this content without the burden of thinking about license compatibility or even crediting a source. Glossaries are one of the most basic building blocks of many educational materials, and there are currently no sources (that we were able to find, after extensive research) that allow for low-burden reuse. Teachers have asked for this again and again, and in its absence, most are just inappropriately borrowing copyrighted content. That’s why we decided to build this open dictionary.”

The ultimate goal is to have a comprehensive and complete edited version, free of inaccuracies and spam. Of course, since it is a wiki (and a dictionary at that), the project can only keep growing. So feel free to contribute! Remember those words that stumped us as kids? You can take a stab at defining them now.

The Alameda County Computer Resource Center, a Bay Area non-profit whose motto is “Obsolescence is Just a Lack of Imagination”, is organizing an Installfest for Schools at LinuxWorld August 4-7th. The Center will be refurbishing recycled computers and donating them to Bay Area schools that can put them to good use.  And as CC has blogged previously, this isn’t their first time around.

In addition to Linux, the computers are loaded with Creative Commons-licensed photos and music from Flickr and Jamendo. The photos and music were selected as part of our LiveContent project. If you’re interested in helping out, you can volunteer, donate, or join the mailing list.

If you’re in the Bay Area for the Linux World Expo, stop by the Exhibit Hall today through Thursday and say “hi”. If you’d like to support CC, we’ll have t-shirts for people donating more than $10. We’ll also be giving away stickers and other random CC paraphernalia. Hope to see you there!

YouTube has become quite the battleground for copyright claims and our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have found some great opportunities to defend fair use and put our licenses to work. Just yesterday they settled a deal between Brian Sapient and Explorologist Ltd. over the fair use of clips critiquing performer Uri Geller’s claims to mental powers. What’s really fantastic (and what motivated us to post) is that the EFF has leveraged the power of our licenses in the settlement itself:

The agreement should allow the healthy debate about the existence of ‘supernatural powers’ to continue without interference. As part of the legal settlement, Explorologist has agreed to license the disputed footage under a non-commercial Creative Commons license, preempting future legal battles over the fair use of the material.

This case follows in a tradition the EFF established when they settled another case in May 2007 with Rick Silver, the creator of the “Electric Slide” dance where Silver was ordered to put the dance itself under our Attribution-NonCommercial license so that derivatives could be made for non-commercial purposes.

Coming to a Linux distribution near you: The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase.

The Community Manager for Ubuntu, Jono Bacon, just announced a contest to have your song or video distributed with the next Ubuntu release in October! What this means is that Ubuntu is giving free culture musicians and movie creators the opportunity to get their work out to millions of users.

The contest is pretty simple:

• you can submit any song or video up to 1 or 3 megs, respectively;
• the materially has to be licensed Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike;
• host it somewhere (archive.org is a good option);
• encode using Ogg;
• and add it to the list on the contest wiki page.

The limitation on size is due to the fact that material will be on every Ubuntu CD and as such size is a key limitation.

Get your music or video sample out there onto the computers of millions of people by the end of October. Not many contests can give you such provocative rewards.

Full Disclosure: I am a member of the Ubuntu Community as the Leader of the Michigan LoCo Team.