Creative Commons has announced the release of two very important tools for the developer community. These tools, liblicense and LicenseChooser.js, provide simple and standard ways of reading or writing license information to a variety of files.
liblicense is specifically geared towards the desktop application developer who wants to use license information in media files but does not want to implement the low-level code themselves. LicenseChooser.js, however, is designed to be used in web applications such as a media sharing site for users’ pictures or music.
Both of these software packages aim to make the lives of the developers’ easier. One way in which that is accomplished is that these tools will continue to be updated as new versions of Creative Commons licenses are released thus moving the burden from the developer to Creative Commons.
There will be a public demonstration of liblicense at OSCON on July 24th. For more information see the Press Release.
SAN FRANCISCO, USA JULY 24, 2008
Creative Commons announced today the release of liblicense and LicenseChooser.js, content licensing tools which make integration of Creative Commons license functionality easy for developers building modern desktop and web applications. These tools enable reading and writing Creative Commons licensing information to a variety of media formats. Many projects already support the ability to read and write content license information through add-ons, including OpenOffice.org, Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office. Other programs, such as the open source vector graphics drawing tool Inkscape, include a default capability to read and write CC license information.
For the desktop, Creative Commons has updated the C language-based software library called liblicense. This Free Software (licensed under GNU LGPL) library provides functionality to read and write license information into many supported media files. Along with access to license information, the library offers a standard set of icons for graphical representation of selected or discovered licenses. As Creative Commons’ international team refreshes the licenses or adds a new jurisdiction, software developers can simply update liblicense to receive these changes. Currently, liblicense is distributed with development versions of the Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora Linux operating systems. The LGPL license permits adding it to both open source and proprietary software.
“LicenseChooser.js and liblicense will make open content licensing more valuable for developers, publishers, and users, by making such content more discoverable and manageable” said Mike Linksvayer, Vice President of Creative Commons.
One prominent project incorporating the use of liblicense in an upcoming release is One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). While the OLPC project wiki already uses Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licenses for contributions, Creative Commons has introduced licensing functionality for the XO laptops through the development of liblicense and a series of patches to be integrated. Once it is installed, it allows software interfacing with media on the device to be content license aware. Also, to explain Creative Commons licensing and the basics of copyright law, Creative Commons has created an educational licensing activity that anyone may install onto an OLPC XO laptop. This activity uses the previously released “Sharing Creative Works” comics.
For web applications, Creative Commons has developed LicenseChooser.js, which allows developers to add similar functionality into any web-based project. Creative Commons already provided an XML-based web services API. LicenseChooser.js provides an additional, lightweight method for integrating license selection into web applications. The widget is used by SixApart’s TypePad as well as the WordPress plugin WpLicense.
Today, liblicense will be demonstrated at this year’s Open Source Conference (OSCON) in Portland, OR. Integration with two Open Source applications will be showcased: the file viewer Eye of GNOME and media player Rhythmbox. The presentation will be given by Nathan Yergler, CTO of Creative Commons, and Asheesh Laroia, Software Engineer, on Thursday July 24th in room F150.
Links
Desktop Integration Software: liblicense
https://creativecommons.org/projects/liblicense
OSCON “Rights on the Desktop with liblicense” Presentation
http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/2857
Web Integration Software: LicenseChooser.js
https://creativecommons.org/projects/LicenseChooser.js
OLPC Creative Commons Page
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Creative_Commons
Creative Commons Sharing Creative Works Public Domain Released Comics
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Sharing_Creative_Works
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
Jon Phillips
Community and Business
Development Manager
Creative Commons
jon@creativecommons.org
+1.510.499.0894
Press Kit
https://creativecommons.org/presskit
A Google twofer for Creative Commons today!
Google Knol opened today, intended to be a platform for authoritative articles about a specific topics, also known as knols, by a created single author or collaboratively. The default license for a new knol is CC Attribution. A creator can also choose CC Attribution-NonCommercial or All Rights Reserved.
Separately, Google Code added an option for software projects to specify a separate license for content associated with a software project — CC Attribution or CC Attribution-ShareAlike. This does not change Google Code’s selection of free and open source software licenses for source code. (Note: Creative Commons also recommends and uses free and open source software licenses such as the GNU GPL for source code.)
It’s really great to see both Google Knol and Google Code launching with and launching support for CC licensing on the same day, and interesting how their choice of licenses to offer differs. Knol defaults to the most liberal CC license, but allows authors to choose a more restrictive (NonCommercial) license, or even the most restrictive option — no public license.
As prior to its launch Knol was often speculatively compared to Wikipedia, it should be noted that the default Knol license (CC BY) could permit using Knol content in Wikipedia (with attribution of course), but knols under more restrictive options could not be incorporated into Wikipedia. On the other hand Wikipedia content could not be incorporated into knols (except in the case of fair use of course), even in the case Wikipedia migrates to CC BY-SA — Knol doesn’t offer a copyleft license.
The two CC licenses offered by Google Code are those that are in the spirit of free and open source software, befitting Google Code’s user base — free and open source software developers.
Photo by Petri Tuohimaa for GMRI, CC BY-NC-ND
“Sarah on a beach near Portland, Maine looking for two species of invasive marine crabs – Carcinus maenas (European green crab) and Hemigrapsus sanguineus (Asian shore crabs).”
In April, I had a chance to meet with Sarah Kirn, Program Manager of Vital Signs, a field and inquiry based science education program at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. The meeting took place in our sunny San Francisco office while Sarah was in town for the week. She marveled at the weather, her native state being Maine, where she has worked with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute since 2002. She explained that the Vital Signs program itself actually started in 1999. Back in 1999, Vital Signs was using Apple E-mates, something which, at my age, I’ve never heard of, much less used. The following are excerpts from our meeting, along with some recent edits over email.
I might have used it, I said. I remember using those old Apples…
“No, no, no,” she said. “It’s not an old box-style computer—it was an early portable computer. They’re really…kind of sleek and green and had a little stylus and keyboard. It was a great piece of technology that didn’t make it into mainstream use. So we started developing Vital Signs on Palm computers in about 2001.”
Let’s rewind a bit. Vital Signs, according to their website and info sheet, “is an inquiry-based, field science education program that links students and scientists in the rigorous collection and analysis of essential environmental data. Innovative technology, relevant content, and critical partnerships create an authentic science learning experience for students, a distributed data gathering network for scientists, and a statewide community of teachers, students, and scientists collaborating to learn about and steward aquatic ecosystems.”
Basically, Vital Signs is focused on giving students firsthand experience of being scientists in the field. The environmental data that students collect will be used by students and scientists—real, professional scientists—in their own research. How will Vital Signs do this? One advantage the program has is its geographic location: Maine. All seventh and eighth grade students in Maine have their very own laptops—and not just any laptops mind you, but laptops made by Apple, those cute white Macbooks with the sheen still on their covers. How did they score those? It starts with a governor who had a vision for revolutionizing education.
I read somewhere that the [laptops] are funded by either the state or the Marine Institute…
“The state. The program was started six years ago. Then Governor Angus King was nearing the end of his final term. He wanted to leave a legacy that would position Maine for success in the 21st century. He started thinking about technology in schools. He asked Seymour Papert, ‘how many computers do I need to put in schools to make a difference? If every school had a classroom full of computers is that enough? If every school had three classrooms full of computers, is that enough?’ Papert replied, ‘it really doesn’t matter how many computers you put in the classrooms unless each student has their own.’ Governor King took a budget surplus and made the first round of the Maine Learning Technology Initiative happen.” (Maine was also the first state with high speed internet access to every library and every school.)
So is it all seventh and eighth graders?
“All seventh and eighth graders and their teachers. It actually started with the teachers first, which was critical to the program’s success. Teachers got their computers a year before their students. Governor King had the insight to get teachers involved in the administration of the project. The woman he hired to run it, Bette Manchester, had worked as a teacher and as a principal. She had the insight that when you take a classroom where traditionally the teacher has been the one with all the knowledge and their job has been to impart that knowledge to their students, and you give all the students their own high speed, connected laptops, you’ve given all the students access to more information than could possibly be in their teacher’s head and this had the potential to flip classrooms upside down. So how [do] you help teachers make that fundamental transition in their role, especially given that teachers often have a different relationship with technology than their students do? There’s often more fear, there’s often less willingness to try things, there’s often more fear about being wrong and doing something that’s going to mess it up. So this is where Bette began.”
So how does Vital Signs fit into it—what role does it play with the laptops, with the Maine Learning Technology Initiative?
“We are developing a suite of software that will enable students to make and record rigorous observations of invasive species in their community’s aquatic habitats, and to work online with each other and with scientists to understand the meaning and importance of the observations they made. We will create an interface that allows students, scientists, and the public to query the database, create maps and graphs of the data, and share multimedia reports and data products. Most of this software suite will be web-based and all of it will be freely available to anyone, but it will also become part of the disk image installed on all 32,000 Maine Learning Technology Initiative laptops.”
So the whole point of Vital Signs is first of all to get students used to technology…
“No, not at all, our primary goal is to build science literacy. But let me back up and tell you a bit about the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. The Gulf of Maine Research Institute has a three-pronged mission. One, we’re doing fisheries ecosystem research. Fisheries have traditionally been managed on a species by species basis, but there is growing demand for a more holistic approach. Species-specific management was simple, but of course every fish in the ocean is eating other fish and competing with other fish for food and being eaten by other things like whales and other species humans want to protect. So there’s all sorts of complicated issues and if you look at it on a species by species basis, you’ve oversimplified it to the point where it breaks down.
“So we do fisheries ecosystem research and the twist that we bring to it is that we partner scientists with fishermen. Fishermen have spent, often, generations at sea. For example, I went fishing with one of our fishermen partners and I was looking around on his boat and I didn’t see any charts (he was using an electronic navigation system). I asked if he carried charts on his boat. He looked at me and said, ‘No.’ ‘What if your electronics break down?,’ I asked. He showed me a little notebook that has all the tows three generations of his family had made. He knows the bottom of the ocean the way we recognize streets on land. He just navigates by the bottom. So there’s that kind of incredible knowledge about where fish are, where you want to catch them, what time of year, the temperature of the water and all the rest. Fishermen also have tremendous skill in handling boats. So if you pair both the knowledge and the skill set of fishermen with the rigorous methodology of scientists, we can start one step ahead of everybody else. And contrary to what many people think, fishermen are not all out to destroy the ocean. They would like their kids to be fishermen, the way they are, and their father and their grandfather were. They are really interested in figuring out different ways to better manage the fish.
“The second thing that we do is community-building and education work around marine resources, bringing together managers, the fishermen, scientists, and environmentalists to all put their ideas on the table. We create neutral space for that to happen in what’s been and continues to be an extraordinarily contentious arena. We’ve become trusted for the neutrality that we bring to the table and for giving everybody respect and equal airtime.
“The third thing that we do, something that we see as essential to creating a sustainable marine ecosystem including humans, is science education. We’re committed to building science literacy in Maine so that citizens have the tools to understand natural resource issues and come to their own informed conclusions. We target our education programs at middle school, which is where researchers suggest that kids either stay in science or pop out of it.”
That’s actually kind of true.
“We have two active education programs at GMRI: Vital Signs and LabVenture!. LabVenture! is a fifth and sixth grade program that happens in our building. We’ve raised money to bring every fifth or sixth grade student in the state to our lab for a half-day immersive science experience. Every school district decides whether the program works best with the fifth or sixth grade curriculum, then we send a bus to the school to bring the students to Portland. We use technology to enable them to work independently of their teachers, and use the scientific method to solve a mystery.”
So they’re doing kind of field work?
“Yeah. The mystery is about the X-Fish––what is it and why is it important. They go through four stations. At one, for example, they use a microscope to look at the fish’s stomach contents and take images––still, digital images––of what they see. They make observations, make hypotheses about what they expect to find, document what they see, and then record their conclusions at each station. The concluding presentation of the LabVenture! program is a colloquium drawing from these student-collected digital assets to solve the mystery of the x-fish.
“Vital Signs will be for 7th and 8th grade students and will immerse students in their own communities. Students will go outside with their laptops and work in teams to investigate and document what they see. One person will have dry hands and sit in a dry place and enter the data, the other team members will take pictures of and identify species and habitats, use a GPS to get location data, use probes to measure water quality and soil quality, write general observations. The software will guide them through making their observations and provide on demand help. They’ll collect all that data, they’ll bring it back to the classroom, they’ll send it to our database. The teacher will have a chance to look at it to evaluate student learning. And then students will actually peer review each other’s work. With Vital Signs I see the opportunity to use technology to enable students to take on the work and the role of the scientist in the field—from asking the questions to collecting the data to analyzing the data.”
“We have two interconnected goals with Vital Signs. One, to give students a richer understanding and experience of what science is and how messy and complex it is. Two, to produce quality data that’s useful to the broader scientific community. We’ve already worked with scientists around the state who are studying invasive species and they’re really interested in the data that will come out of Vital Signs. This is a big motivating factor in the students but also the teachers who really like to be able to tell their students so and so scientists are looking at this question just like you are and they’re really interested in the data that you find from this site.”
I’m interested in how the peer review process actually works.
“We’re still working out the details, but the main idea is that students will develop an identity within the program. They’ll be able to gain and demonstrate expertise in the various data collection tasks-–-identifying individual species, taking crisp photographs that let viewers verify identifications, writing interesting and relevant observations, using the water quality probes, etc. When they have been recognized as having achieved proficiency in a particular task, they’ll be able to exercise their knowledge by providing a review of un-verified records. For example, if you’ve demonstrated expertise in identifying European Green Crabs, Carcinus maenas, you’ll be able to search the database for unverified sightings of these crabs and comment on whether they were correctly identified or not.”
Are you looking to expand this outside of Maine?
“Maine is absolutely the perfect place to develop and test Vital Signs, but our attitude towards practically everything that we develop, whether it’s in education or science or community, is that if we solve a problem that we have in Maine, that solution might be really valuable to somebody else outside of Maine. Maybe not for the same thing that we’re dealing with but for something else that they’re concerned about. So we’re always interested in building programs such that they may be modeled and may be replicated or extended outside the Gulf of Maine. With Vital Signs all our code will be released as open source software so the components can be used elsewhere. We’re very interested in partnering with organizations outside of Maine to expand or replicate Vital Signs.”
That’s where Creative Commons and open education comes in?
“Right. The first thing I talked to Ahrash [Bissell, ccLearn director] about was actually the student data, and how do you license it so that it is open to be used and obvious that it may be used. One of the things you come up against in education is the need to protect the identity of your students. And there are other considerations: if you’re working for [Creative Commons] or I’m working for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, the product of our work is owned by our employers. But students, they’re not employees of the school…
“So what we’re working out is, exactly how do we create attribution? Who gets attribution? Are you able to cite this body of information? We really hope it’s used by people other than the students. And we absolutely encourage students to remix the data. There’s all sorts of things you can repackage and re-purpose.
“Every educational resource that GMRI has created has always been out there for people to use. When we post activities online we don’t presume that teachers will only use the activity the way we’ve written it. And often the activities that we write have suggestions for how to change them that might suit one group of students or an older or a younger group of students. So I think there’s a general assumption that what we post online is going to be reused and remixed.”
Currently, the Gulf of Maine Research Institute’s website (including what they have up so far for Vital Signs) is CC licensed under CC BY-NC-ND. The environmental focus of Vital Signs for the fall of this year will be Invasive Species Monitoring—so seventh and eighth graders will be out in the field collecting data on invasive species for scientists to study for their research.
When I asked Sarah how and why she ended up managing the Vital Signs program for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, she told me that her first job after college was as an Outward Bound sailing instructor teaching sailing courses off the coast of Maine. The experience inspired her educational [philosophy], or pedagogy, a word she normally doesn’t like. It’s all about giving students a genuine role to play and making learning contextual. After completing her masters in Oceanography, she realized she didn’t want to do just research and that she didn’t want to do just education. Vital Signs was perfect because it was “something in the middle.” “Vital Signs gives students a real role to play in answering authentic questions. When you put learning in an authentic context, it’s much more real.”
We all remember our math teachers don’t we? Sarah remembers her Calculus teacher back in high school…
“Mr. Smith, why are we learning calculus? What’s the big picture?” asked an eighteen year old Sarah.
“Well, Sarah,” he replied, “maybe you’re going to work designing cans in the future. Then you’ll have to maximize volume and minimize surface area…”
“There is no way on earth that I am going to design cans!” she remembers thinking.
Among her many activities including sailing boats, hobnobbing with local fishermen and consulting with scientific experts in her field, Sarah has not quite made the time to design a single can yet. But she is spearheading the ongoing Vital Signs project, which is a significant indicator of the changing science education landscape towards sharing and openness.
Dans les jardins de Monte-Carlo | No known copyright restrictions.
Two more amazing photo collections have been added to the continuously growing Flickr Commons, one coming from the George Eastman House and the other from Le Bibliothèque de Toulouse. Both groups’ photostreams are absolutely amazing to pour over, offering stunning images from the turn of the century that are all released in the public domain. Again, in case you have missed any of our other posts on the Flickr Commons, some info below:
The key goals of The Commons are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer. You’re invited to help describe the photographs you discover in The Commons on Flickr, either by adding tags or leaving comments
The rest of the institutions on the Flickr Commons have all recently added new photos as well, increasing the worth of an already phenomenal resource.
Dans les jardins de Monte-Carlo | No known copyright restrictions.
Two more amazing photo collections have been added to the continuously growing Flickr Commons, one coming from the George Eastman House and the other from Le Bibliothèque de Toulouse. Both groups’ photostreams are absolutely amazing to pour over, offering stunning images from the turn of the century that are all released in the public domain. Again, in case you have missed any of our other posts on the Flickr Commons, some info below:
The key goals of The Commons are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer. You’re invited to help describe the photographs you discover in The Commons on Flickr, either by adding tags or leaving comments
The rest of the institutions on the Flickr Commons have all recently added new photos as well, increasing the worth of an already phenomenal resource.
