Jordan has long been a geographical area where Creative Commons has looked to expand (you can read about our Jordan-specific jurisdiction work here) – as such, recent news about the promotion of CC, the public domain, and an increased spirit of sharing in Jordan is inspiring.

Two UK artists, Eileen Simpson and Ben White of the Open Music Archive, have been traveling throughout Jordan for the past 6 months, advocating for the establishment of a ‘CC Jordan’ as a means for local artists to “freely collaborate without harsh licensing restrictions”. To Simpson and White, CC licences would act as a means to promote authors, artists, filmmakers, and musicians across the country with Simpson stating, “if we weren’t allowed to refer back to previous works, to walk down the path of others, we would just be lost, and the creative community will be stifled.” From TechNewsWorld:

In an effort to highlight the importance of a diverse and vibrant public domain, Simpson and White spent the last six months attempting to sample old Jordanian films and musical works whose copyrights have expired, an experiment to work within restrictions imposed by international and local trademark and copyright laws.

[…]

Unable to find archived material that is now completely accessible in the public domain, they turned to the Jordan Academy of Music, which collected folk songs from the Kingdom for the 2002 celebration of Amman as Arab Cultural Capital. As the recordings are from the shared community and have no accredited author, the folk songs are a part of the public domain and therefore are not owned or controlled by anyone and are considered as “public property.”

Simpson and White plan on taking the songs and remixing them with local artists, updating the ballads and encouraging artists to explore the music further. “We all build on the creativity of others, and we should be able to build on others’ work in a fair manner,” Simpson told The Jordan Times […] “The whole concept passes on the spirit of sharing, which in a creative community is important to do,” she said, adding that legally allowing creative collaboration would curb intellectual property rights violations.

The article also touches on the amazing work of Abu-Ghazaleh Intellectual Property who we have been working with in an effort to port CC licences to Jordan and the rest of the Arab world.

About 3 months ago we blogged about the great webcomic Diesel Sweeties and the decision of its creator, rstevens, to release a 10 volume set of DS archives under a CC BY-NC license. Over the weekend, rstevens got the last of the ebooks up, totaling at 2,000 freely licensed webcomics! You can download them directly from the Diesel Sweeties website or ‘many popular bittorrent trackers‘ (via Boing Boing).

Big Buck Bunny, a short 3D animated film produced by the Amsterdam-based ‘Blender Institute‘ (who we have praised previously), was recentlly posted for download online. Debuted publicly back in March (our own Jon Phillips spoke before the premier), the film is being released online under the non-restrictive CC BY license as a means to widely demonstrate the open-source 3D animation software Blender.

To say BBB looks good would be an understatement – it is absolutely jaw-dropping! You can see it in beautiful HD over at vimeo or download it in a bevy of formats at the BBB website. Similarly, reuse stories are already popping up with one local TV station in Worcester, MA broadcasting the short in prime time. Be sure to check out the movie in some form and read more about the license use and motivation behind the film here.

Between twittering, blogging, founding copyfighting organizations, starting free culture chapters, and attending law school, frothing open source advocate Brian Rowe has moved his headquarters to CC’s San Francisco office to hone his legal research skillz. He will spend the summer crawling through the muck of works with multiple licenses for different resolutions, slicing through commercial vs. noncommercial classifications, and pontificating on the differences between linking and embedding.

Brian likes food, specifically cheese(the moldier the better), sushi, and bourbon. He plans to spend his unpaid internship (thx PILF Grant ^_^) crashing various tech parties to steal food and impersonate Robert Scoble. His hobbies include competitive chess, reading, Japanese Tea Ceremonies, and explaining to Microsoft employees the value of open access (he hails from Seattle, you see).

Brian’s aspirations are to finish law school, pass the bar, and then stick out his tongue at multi-million dollar Patent-Troll-defending job offers in favor of an ethical, and indeed saintly career defending freedom for information worldwide.

In a provocative interview with Cory Doctorow about his new book Little Brother, the non-satirical Onion A.V. club investigates the blogger cum sci-fi author’s motivations and strategies for convincing his publisher to simultaneously release his young adult book under CC and hardcover:

AVC: Was the Creative Commons release strategy a hard sell with Tor that first time out?

CD: No, it was totally trivial, in fact. I lucked out in two respects. My editor at Tor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, is super-geeky. We met on a BBS in the ’80s, and he runs his own Linux boxes; it just made a lot of sense for him. Furthermore, he’s also the senior editor at Tor, he runs the science-fiction and fantasy line at Tor, so he kind of doesn’t have to ask anyone when he wants to do this stuff.

…

Tom Doherty and Patrick both looked at this and said, “You know, electronic books represent the worst ratio of hours spent in meetings to dollars generated in income of anything we’ve ever tried at this press. Here’s something that’s relatively free—all we need to do is give it away, and we can see what people want to do with it. And if it works, great. And if it doesn’t work, well, we’ve learned. And if it’s inconclusive, we can try more, because we’re a big press, we’ve got lots and lots of books, and we can try lots of different things.” [emphasis added] And if it’s going to work for anyone, it’s going to work for me, because I’ve got such a good online presence. And you can see that they’re now trying this with writers who have a less prominent online presence, and they’re finding that by and large, it’s working pretty well for them.

Click here to read full interview.

Came across this awesome business that’s been building up traction in Japan called C-shirt — powered by media-wiki company Nota that leverages Creative Commons licensing in a pretty unconventional way. At first glance, it might seem like one of the innumerable t-shirt vendor sites out there — but it is, in fact, way, way cooler.

First, the conventional idea: users submit t-shirt designs which can be viewed online and ordered for printing. However, the twist is that since all the designs are placed under CC, Nota provides an interface with which to edit and reproduce these designs accordingly. Once you’ve remixed it to your liking, C-shirt will print and ship your unique version right to your door. Depending on the license, you can even repost your new design to the site.

Even better, the service is outfitted to work with some enabled mobile devices, so if you see a shirt you like on the street, you can scan the Quick Response (QR) code included on each design with your phone, which will capture a unique address where you can load and edit the t-shirt before getting it yourself.

Very slick. It’s mostly been active in Japan, but I’m hoping they start to make the crossover into the States. Thinking it’d be easy to expand this into a whole range of products — hats, lunchboxes, computers…

Over on the Science Commons blog, Donna Wentworth writes:

The drug discovery process is badly broken. Despite the scientific and technological advances that make genetic decoding commonplace, the time it takes to go from gene target to cure still stands at 17 years.

Science Commons’ mission is to speed the translation of basic research to useful discoveries, and we believe that a new approach is necessary to find more cures, faster. Today, we’re opening up the Health Commons, a project aimed at bringing the same efficiencies to human health that the network brought to commerce and culture.

The project, founded by Science Commons in collaboration with CommerceNet, CollabRX and the Public Library of Science (PLoS), is introduced in a 6-minute video presentation and white paper posted on the Science Commons website. The paper, Health Commons: Therapy Development in a Networked World [PDF], is co-authored by John Wilbanks, Vice President of Science at Creative Commons, and Marty Tenenbaum, an Internet commerce pioneer and founder of CommerceNet and CollabRX. […]

More after the jump …

Creative Commons is working with Iuridicum remedium, the National Library in the Czech Republic, and the Union of Independent Authors to create Czech jurisdiction-specific licenses from the generic Creative Commons licenses.

CCi Czech List

Public Project Lead:  Lukáš Gruber, National Library of the Czech Republic

Legal Project Lead: Petr Jansa and Marek Tichy, Iuridicum Remedium

For close cooperation we would like to thank the Institute of Copyright, Industrial Property and Competition Law of the Faculty of Law of Charles University, especially JUDr. Irena Holcová

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

More About Iuridicum Remedium

Iuridicum remedium (IuRe) is a non-governmental non-profit organisation promoting human rights. It focuses on the broad infringements on individual rights as a result of legislative action, and also deals with specific cases of human rights violations. IuRe’s activities include current threats to human rights in the fields of Social Exclusion; Human Rights and Technologies; and Human Rights and Public Administration. IuRe is active in the areas of legislation and legal assistance, and disseminates information to both the professional community and the general public. Iuridicum Remedium is a member of EDRi, European Digital Rights network.

Iuridicum Remedium believes it’s the authors’ right to decide about the use of it’s own work, and the Creative Commons project falls under the scope of the Human Rights and Technologies Programme. Please see also http://www.bigbrotherawards.cz.

More About the National Library of the Czech Republic

The National Library of the Czech Republic works on Creative Commons within its Webarchive. Webarchive is a project which aims to archive the entire content of Czech internet. Webarchive is dedicated to porting the Creative Commons licenses in order to resolve legal issues in making the archived content available to public.

More About the Union of Independent Authors

The Union of Independent Authors is an member association supporting individual authors, publishers, festival and party organizers. It is interested in localizing and spreading Creative Commons in the Czech Republic as a tool for independent authors for distributing their work.

The project also has a support of the copyright department of the Ministry of Culture and Faculty of Philosophy and Arts, Charles University of Prague.

CC Australia List

Creative Commons is working with Queensland University of Technology (QUT) to create Australia jurisdiction-specific licenses from the generic Creative Commons licenses.

Project Lead: Tom Cochrane (Deputy Vice Chancellor QUT) and Professor Brian Fitzgerald Head of Law School (QUT)

Team Members: Jessica Coates (Project Manager), Elliott Bledsoe, Rachel Cobcroft, Nic Suzor

• License Draft (BY 3.0) (PDF).
• License Draft (BY-NC-SA 3.0) (PDF).
• Commentary about CCau v3.0.
• Post a message.
• Subscribe to the discussion.
• Read the discussion archives.

Archives:

• License Draft (v0.3I) (PDF).
• Explanation of substantive legal changes (v0.3I) (PDF).
• Draft with markup changes to US license (v0.3I) (PDF).

More about QUT

QUT is one of the largest universities in Australia and possesses strong interest in and commitment to information law and policy. DVC of Information Services Tom Cochrane has long been associated with intellectual property law and policy developments in Australia and been involved with a number of influential government and non-government committees. Professor Brian Fitzgerald has an international reputation in the area of Cyberlaw, Technology and Intellectual Property and heads a Law School that offers a broad range of courses in this area.

QUT is also home to the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, which funds two research projects closely associated with Creative Commons Australia – the Creative Commons Clinic and the Creative Commons and Open Content Licensing Models project. Both these projects are headed up by Professor Fitzgerald, and seek to investigate and encourage the take up of the Creative Commons and other open content licensing models in Australia and internationally.

Acknowledgements

The leaders of Creative Commons in Australia would like to thank the following people for their assistance in drafting the licences and their ongoing commitment and involvement with CCau: Ian Oi, Karen Gettens, Delia Browne (Ministerial Council for Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs), Neale Hooper (Queensland Treasury), Andrew Garton (Toysatellite), Karen Gettens, Sally Hanson (Arts Law Centre from 2004), Ishtiaque Omar, Sally Hines, Peter Edmundson and Barbara Phair (Blake Dawson Waldron Lawyers).and the following people for their feedback: Peter James, Ben Lehman and Andrew Cameron (Allens Arthur Robinson) and research assistants Sally Hawkins and Nic Suzor.

Jono Bacon, the Community Manager for Ubuntu and full-time metal head, recently announced a new musical project he is undertaking, SeveredFifth.

SeveredFifth is Jono’s new music project with the aims of seeing how far one musician can take the concept of Free (as in Freedom) music. Jono:

“Severed Fifth is really here to ask questions – both musically, and in terms of the new music economy.”

To accomplish this goal he is releasing his first album under the name SeveredFifth using a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license.  This license is easy to understand to any member of the Open Source Software persuasion (the group with which Jono is most active in currently); you are free to make copies, redistribute, or modify it as long as you cite correct attribution and keep it under the same license. Jono:

“I chose that license because I wanted to secure some key rights for listeners of my music – rights that I feel are important as a listener. I think the choice of license is key to the aims of the project.”

Because Jono is empowering his fan base with the use of the CC Licenses, the community of listeners which form around the music are the ones who will improve the project the most.  The initial work of creating publicity materials such as the website and photography has been done by some of Jono’s friends, but without the contributions of community members the project can not succeed.

“I think the key ingredient here is assembling a group of people who have a shared ethos – this is what we do in Free Software, and this is what I am doing with Severed Fifth – its incredible what is possible when the right minds come together.”

I encourage everyone who has a musical taste which leans towards metal to head on over to SeveredFifth and sign up for the newsletter and join the discussion; great things are sure to happen.