Tribe of Noise, a community driven music discovery network, is now open for all to join and participate.  Tribe of Noise, which was started by Hessel van Oorschot and Sandra Brandenburg in the Netherlands, allows artists to upload their works using the CC:BY-SA license.  The roots and goals of the project are related to the Open Source Software community which in turn influenced the license Tribe of Noise chose.

Tribe of Noise is using this license so the community can discover new music and develop new relationships with the participating artists.

The artists that participate with Tribe of Noise will have many benefits including a personalized webshop along with legal and technical support in the future.  Participating with this project, as a user or artist, will help advance new methods of music creation along with appreciation and new plans for financial sustainability.

The Geograph British Isles project, which aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometer of Great Britain and Ireland, has started releasing torrents of their photographs available for anyone to download and use.

The project has divided the area of Great Britain and Ireland into a grid with equal size squares and users can submit representative photographs for each square.  One of Geograph British Isles’ hope is that by incentivizing their users to submit high quality photos of their country they are encouraging them to get out and explore, learn, and appreciate their country more. Below is an example image from a square Longnor, Shropshire, Great Britain:

CC:BY-SA – Adrian Bailey

Geograph British Isles is making available torrents of all images in the database, which currently has 860,000 images, in 50,000 image sections.  “Everything in the torrents — images and metadata — is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence, and the RDF file references the licence terms for each item in the volume.”

“If anyone would like access to lots of geolocated images, or is simply able to help us seed the torrents – be my guest!” – Paul Dixon, software developer for the project.

Two upcoming speaking engagements that should be fun, at least for me…

Next week Bay Area Linux Users Group in San Francisco. This should be fun because I’ve attended a bunch of BALUG meetings, mostly in the last decade, and due to location and great volunteers their speakers are a who’s who of open source, and my talk will include some material I covered at LugRadio Live USA in a talk a few months ago, which I think makes a number of points that ought to be better known regarding where free culture is relative to free software/open source. I’d love comments. See the LugRadio video and slides or better yet come to BALUG next week.

August 4 I’ll speak at the Distributed Computing Industry Association’s P2P Media Summit Silicon Valley in San Jose, exact topic to be determined. I’m really pleased to be speaking here, as in the past I’ve found distributed computing/P2P conferences to have the highest idea quotient of any in the vicinity (e.g., the first O’Reilly P2P conference in 2001, which eventually turned into ETech, and CodeCon) and I think there are many interesting questions and latent opportunities for P2P with the free/open world and vice versa — last year I barely touched on several of these in a workshop at the iSummit, and I really look forward to digging into these.

DCIA is offering a special member rate to P2P Media Summit attendees referred by Creative Commons. Regular conference registration is here. To get the special rate call DCIA Business Affairs/Sari Lafferty, contact information on the conference home page.

Thanks to BALUG and DCIA!

Between these events and elsewhere, CC will be heavily represented at the very important Euroscience Open Forum (Barcelona), OSCON (Portland), CC Salon New York, and iSummit’08 (Sapporo). And I have to mention Wikimania (Alexandria), which I will attend … sadly, next year, though there will probably be no more interesting and relevant conference in this time period.

Great news being released today that Esther Wojcicki, prominent education innovator, has officially joined the Creative Commons board! We’re thrilled (and lucky) to get her experience and advice on all our developing education related initiatives.

You can read all the details at our press releases page.

(photo courtesy Joi Ito, CC BY)

San Francisco, CA – July 10, 2008

Creative Commons (CC), a global non-profit focused on the preservation and growth of a openly shareable and remixable media landscape, officially announced today that education innovator Esther Wojcicki has joined its Board of Directors.

Wojcicki has been a prominent figure in American education. As the leading mind behind the creation of the country’s largest high school journalism program, she has won numerous awards, including the prestigious title of Teacher of the Year from the California State Teacher Credentialing Commission. Most recently, she received special recognition for her work from the National Scholastic Press Association.

“We’re truly excited to have Esther on board. Her presence marks an important step in the developing role Creative Commons seeks to play in supporting open educational content” commented Joi Ito, CEO of CC, “Her experience and advice will be an invaluable part of shaping our future in that arena.

Esther Wojcicki said, “I am thrilled to be joining the talented team of directors, advisors, and staff at Creative Commons, whose collaborative efforts are supporting the expansion of the public domain. I look forward to applying my experience in education and technology, and am eager to work closely with the Board as this pioneering organization continues to grow.”

Wojcicki has also been a key pioneer in exploring the emerging interface between education and technology. She helped lay the groundwork for the design of the Google Teacher Outreach Program and Google Teacher Academy, a professional development event which trains teachers to leverage innovative technologies to enhance their classrooms.

Wojcicki joins a board of directors that includes technologist Joi Ito, cyberlaw and intellectual property experts James Boyle, Michael Carroll, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, Eric Saltzman, and Lawrence Lessig, MIT computer science professor Hal Abelson, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, documentary filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, and Public Knowledge founder Laurie Racine.

More About Esther Wojcicki

Esther Wojcicki has been teaching Journalism and English at Palo Alto High School, Palo Alto, California for the past 25 years, where she has been the driving force behind the development of its award-winning journalism program. It is now the largest high school journalism program in the U.S involving 400 students. All the publications can be found at http://voice.paly.net which is the school publication website. In the spring of 2008, she was recognized for inspiration and excellence in scholastic journalism advising by the National Scholastic Press Association. She has won multiple awards throughout the years. A couple of others included the 1990 Northern California Journalism teacher of the year in 1990 and California State Teacher Credentialing Commission Teacher of the Year in 2002. She served on the University of California Office of the President Curriculum Committee where she helped revise the beginning and advanced journalism curriculum for the state of California. In 2005–6 she worked as the Google educational consultant and helped design the Google Teacher Outreach program, which includes the website www.google.com/educators and the Google Teacher Academy. She holds a B.A. degree from UC Berkeley in English and Political Science, a general secondary teaching credential from UC Berkeley, a graduate degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley, an advanced degree in French and French History from the Sorbonne, Paris, a Secondary School Administrative Credential from San Jose State University, and a M.A. in Educational Technology from San Jose State University. She has also worked as a professional journalist for multiple publications and now blogs regularly for HuffingtonPost and HotChalk.

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

Ahrash Bissell

Executive Director, ccLearn

Creative Commons

ahrash@creativecommons.org

PRESS KIT

https://creativecommons.org/presskit

Our good friend and new media sociologist Alek Tarkowski from CC Poland has been working hard to compile data for a new report on Flickr user patterns and content licensing. This’ll be a great boost for deepening our developing case study, and will go a long way to supporting our ongoing efforts to develop an understanding of how creators release their works.

But he needs your help to gather data! You can get a link to his short survey here. Definitely worth the few minutes.

For more on CC Poland’s work check out their site.

Opera Software, know for their browser of the same name and a strict adherence to web standards, recently released 23 articles of their Web Standards Curriculum for free under a CC BY-NC-SA license, with 30 more to follow in the coming months. The WSC is intended to teach “standards-based web development, including HTML, CSS, design principles and background theory, and JavaScript basics” and has the approval of a variety of organizations including Yahoo! and The Web Standards Project.

LegalTorrents, “an online community created to discover and distribute Creative Commons licensed digital media”, recently revamped their website to include a stronger community focus as well as a more fluid user experience. We caught up with Jonathan Dugan to find out more about what LegalTorrents can offer those in the CC-community and why CC-using content creators should look to LegalTorrents as a means for online distribution.

Can you give us some background on LegalTorrents? When and why did it start up? Who’s involved?

Simon Carless started LegalTorrents in 2003 and focused on hand-selected, high quality content that was legal to share and distribute. In November 2007, I partnered with Simon to rebuild the site under a new company called Matson Systems.

Since then we’ve grown a small team to build and maintain the site. In addition to our initial goal of distributing high quality content, we also plan to build a community of people interested in finding and sharing this media, and supporting content creators though voluntary financial sponsorship.

The team and their biographies are at our website.
(more…)

Creative Commons held our first TechSummit at Google last month.  This event included an update and overview of Creative Commons technologies, panels featuring other leaders in open digital rights technologies, and a look at the future, including the role of digital copyright registries.  If you are curious of who all the speakers were you can still find the list on the TechSummit informational page.  Many presenters’ slides are also available from that page.

For those that could not attend the Tech Summit can now view the entire event online thanks to Google (who graciously hosted the event for us).  There are four 1-hour long videos available and they are broken up by sessions.  You can find session topics and presenters on the TechSummit information page.

The videos –

Video 1:

• Welcome and mini-keynote (Joi Ito)
• Talk: Introduction to ccREL (Ben Adida)
• Panel: Current CC, Science Commons, and ccLearn technology initiatives

Video 2:

• Panel: Digital Asset Management on the web and the desktop
• Talk: Digital copyright registry technology landscape, challenges, opportunities (Mike Linksvayer)

Video 3:

• Panel: Developers of digital copyright registries and similar animals

Video 4:

• Plenary: “Copyright 2.0” technologies and digital copyright registries: what next?

Thanks to all who participated!

ETC Press has just launched as an “academic, open source, multimedia, publishing imprint.” The project is affiliated with the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University and is in partnership with Lulu.com. When authors submit their work to ETC they retain ownership of it but they also must submit it under either an Attribution-NoDerivativeWorks-NonCommercial or an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

ETC press then posts the works to Lulu.com where they are available for purchase in its hardcopy form, or free download. While the project focuses specifically on writing about entertainment technology, it is easy to see ETC’s model scaling to publishers of other topics and genres.

Check out ETC’s current titles to download or buy here.