Creative Commons is working with the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja to create Ecuador jurisdiction-specific licenses from the generic Creative Commons licenses.

CCi Ecuador List

Project Leads: Dr. Juan José Puertas Ortega, Carlos Correa Loyola
Team members: Dra. Patricia Pacheco Montoya and Abg. Verónica Granda González, Abg. Gabriela Armijos Maurad.

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More about the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja

The Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja was founded by the Ecuadorian Marist Association (AME) on May 3rd, 1971.

UTPL was officially recognized by the State of Ecuador under Executive Decree 646, published in the Official Register Nr. 217 of May 5th, 1971, in which it was constituted as an autonomous legal entity on the basis of the “Modus Vivendi” Agreement between the Holy See and the State of Ecuador, following the Church’s regulations in its organization and government.

On October 27th, 1997, the Diocese of Loja transferred indefinitely to the “Idente Association of Christ the Redeemer, Idente Missionaries” the operation of the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja, to be conducted with total autonomy and in accordance with Idente charisma.

In 1976 the UTPL inaugurated the Distance Education Modality, the first in Latin America. The current statute, approved by the National Council of Higher Education, CONESUP, on January 30th, 2002, established that the institution would offer higher education at undergraduate and graduate levels through the following modalities: Traditional, and Open and Distance, with its variants: a) Traditional Distance; b) Mixed Mode; and c) Virtual.

The UTPL educational model is centered on “Productive Entrepreneurship” in which the students and the professors take part in real projects in the Centers for Research, Technology Transfer, Extension and Service (CITTES)

In summary, the academic life of UTPL combines all the dimensions of the university: the CITTES, the Schools, their programs in the Traditional and Distance Modalities, and service to society, with a strong humanist perspective.

Submissions due April 26. Head on over to the complete CFP.

The program chairs are Jonathan Zittrain, Oxford University, UK, Tyng-Ruey Chuang, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and Giorgos Cheliotis, Singapore Management University, Singapore.

This is a fantastic opportunity for researchers studying the commons to share with peers in this highly interdisciplinary field.

Matthew Davidson, self-proclaimed sound-designer/graphic artist/hobby photographer/computer fanatic, recently released an amazing 3GB sample pack, “Total Harmonic Distortion”, under a CC BY license. This pack has popped up in numerous places, including the massive OLPC sample fest we discussed earlier, but is in itself is a thing of electronic sample beauty. You can download it for free at LegalTorrents, an “an online community created to discover and distribute Creative Commons licensed digital media”.

blip.tv has long been a CC-friendly staple for video sharing online, providing users a means to upload their content under a CC licence while simultaneously facilitating commercial avenues that would go otherwise unforeseen. We recentlly got up with blip.tv CTO Justin Day and asked him some questions, allowing us to peer more deeply into the unique opportunities blip.tv provides for its users.

(photo via potatono)

Can you give us some background on blip.tv? When and why did it start up? Who’s involved? What is blip.tv’s purpose?

Blip.tv is a video hosting site that’s focused on shows. What that means is that we narrow our attention to independent content creators who make regular episodic shows on the web. We started in direct response to the needs of the emerging videoblogging community in 2005. Our purpose was to give shows an open platform from which they could build their own brand and identity online.

Unlike a lot of online video-sharing sites, blip.tv focuses on episodic content. What led you to this focus?

We focused on episodic content because we’ve always positioned blip.tv to be a pro-sumer tool for independent content creators. Because the community has grown from simple video diaries to web shows of every sort, we’ve grown with them.

blip.tv is distinct in that it has an interesting ad-revenue sharing model with content uploaders as well as distribution deals outside of the web. Can you elaborate on what this entails and share any illuminating anecdotes?

We view monetization and distribution all as part of the same whole, which is to provide the content creators with the best tools to keep making great shows. With advertising we allow shows to opt-in to our network of ad networks right from the first day. Once they build an audience we go to work with direct sponsorship sales. All revenue is split down right down the middle with the creators. Distribution is similar, we want to give a show as much exposure as possible be that on blip.tv, their own website, iTunes, or direct to the living room like with the Sony Bravia. It only helps us both. One of the most interesting lessons learned in my mind was how important building a destination site brand is to driving that exposure, which is one of the reasons why more of our focus has been there in recent months. Originally we thought of ourselves as merely a platform, whereas now we understand that in order to be effective we have to be both platform and destination.

The option to CC license is built into to blip.tv’s UI. Do you find that users utilize CC licensing often? What are the benefits users have in using CC licenses on blip.tv?

From the very beginning we’ve been big proponents of openness and sharing. We’ve never had licensing where we claim to own other peoples content, nor have we ever tried to obscure direct downloads of the original source material. CC plays a critical role in maintaining an open community from which everyone benefits. Nearly a quarter of the videos uploaded to blip.tv are under CC licensing. By allowing for sharing, re-mixing and re-sharing on the content creator’s own terms we provide more opportunity for shows to grow and build community.

CC Founder Larry Lessig has called blip.tv a “true” sharing site as it allows content creators the option to have their videos downloaded, enabling sharing and reuse. Can you talk about any interesting instances of reuse that have arisen from users choosing CC licensing?

I think one of the most interesting CC experiences I’ve seen on blip.tv was early on, when Rudy Jahchan and Casey McKinnon, the brilliant minds behind Galacticast, created an episode titled “Node 666”. Members of the videoblogging community created clips which imagined themselves as survivors of a post apocalyptic earth and uploaded them to blip.tv under CC licensing. Rudy and Casey gathered and edited together the clips into to one of their most memorable episodes to date.

What’s next for blip.tv?

Next for blip.tv is to keep doing what we’ve been doing, which is building great tools for great video makers. We want to keep pushing independent show creators to the forefront until they are able to build sustainable businesses out of their creative talents. Part of that vision is to continue leveraging CC licensing to give content creators access to distribute and re-use great content.

Open education and Creative Commons projects very often go hand-in-hand, just as the talented folks at ccLearn are demonstrating with the Universal education search, Cape Town Open Education Declaration, and ODEPO Project.

A Creative Commons jurisdiction that has really taken to pursuing the goals of open education and related learning initiatives is CC Ecuador, the forty-fifth jurisdiction worldwide to port the Creative Commons licensing suite.

CC Ecuador will celebrate its involvement in the license porting process on Tuesday at 6:00pm at the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja (UTPL) as one of the highlights of the annual Congress for Quality Assurance and Main Challenges in Distance Learning, a 3-day conference focusing on issues in education within Latin America. Creative Commons Board Member Michael Carroll will join the event as a keynote speaker.

CC Ecuador will also be unveiling the university’s open courseware initiative, “Open UTPL,” a project that will offer entire courses, books, study guides, and multimedia content under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 Ecuador license.

Our warmest congratulations to the CC Ecuador team, Dr. Juan José Puertas Ortega and Carlos Correa Loyola, with team members Dra. Patricia Pacheco Montoya, Abg. Verónica Granda González, and Abg. Gabriela Armijos Maurad.

The localized Ecuadorian licenses will be the second CC licensing suite to be released at Version 3.0 in Spanish, following CC Puerto Rico’s launch this past February. Also, for the first time, we will be publishing our press release in two languages.

Image: Flyer by CC Ecuador. CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Loja, Ecuador and San Francisco, CA, USA — April 22, 2008

Ecuador, the forty-fifth jurisdiction worldwide to port the Creative Commons licensing suite, will celebrate its launch today at the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja (UTPL).

The Creative Commons Ecuador team has coordinated the porting process and public discussion with local and international legal experts under the leadership of Project Leads Dr. Juan José Puertas Ortega and Carlos Correa Loyola, with team members Dra. Patricia Pacheco Montoya, Abg. Verónica Granda González, and Abg. Gabriela Armijos Maurad.

The launch event will be held at University Convention Center at 6:00pm, together with the opening ceremony of university’s open courseware initiative, “Open UTPL.” Open UTPL will offer entire courses, books, study guides, and multimedia content under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 Ecuador license, as part of UPTL’s initiatives dedicated to educational resources. Creative Commons Board Member Michael Carroll will join the CC Ecuador’s launch event as a keynote speaker.

The CC Ecuador team explains, “The UTPL is interested in promoting cultural production and research, so we have taken the initiative to launch the Creative Commons licenses as an alternative to ‘all-rights-reserved’ copyright. To achieve this, we have been going through a process of adapting the international license to our legislation, in discussions both public and private, and we have worked together with our community stakeholders and notable representatives in the field of copyright to reach a public presentation of its launch.”

The localized Ecuadorian Creative Commons licenses, soon available online, will be an important part of the annual Congress for Quality Assurance and Main Challenges in Distance Learning, a 3-day conference focusing on issues in education within Latin America.

About Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja

The Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja was founded by the Ecuadorian Marist Association (AME) on May 3rd, 1971. UTPL was officially recognized by the State of Ecuador under Executive Decree 646, in which it was constituted as an autonomous legal entity on the basis of the “Modus Vivendi” Agreement between the Holy See and the State of Ecuador, following the Church’s regulations in its organization and government.

The UTPL educational model is centered on “Productive Entrepreneurship” in which the students and the professors take part in real projects in the Centers for Research, Technology Transfer, Extension and Service (CITTES). The academic life of UTPL combines all the dimensions of the university: the CITTES, the Schools, their programs in the Traditional and Distance Modalities, and service to society, with a strong humanist perspective. For more information, please visit: http://www.utpl.edu.ec/.

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, the 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

Dr. Catharina Maracke
Director
Creative Commons International, Creative Commons

Press Kit

https://creativecommons.org/presskit
https://creativecommons.org/international/ec/

*****************

Ecuador estimula el aprendizaje, la investigación, y la creatividad con las licencias de CC

Loja, Ecuador y San Francisco, CA, USA — 22 de Abril del 2008

Ecuador, la cuadragésima quinta jurisdicción a nivel mundial en adaptar el conjunto de licencias de Creative Commons, celebrará el día de hoy el lanzamiento de dichas licencias en la Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja (UTPL).

El equipo de Creative Commons Ecuador ha coordinado el proceso de adaptación y discusión pública con las entidades locales y expertos en derecho internacional, bajo la dirección de líderes del proyecto Dr. Juan José Puertas Ortega y Carlos Correa Loyola, acompañados con los miembros del equipo, Dra. Patricia Pacheco Montoya, Lic. Verónica González Granda, y Lic. Gabriela Armijos Maurad.

El evento del lanzamiento se llevará a cabo en el Centro de Convención de la UTPL a las 6:00 p.m., junto con la apertura ceremonial de los cursos “Open UTPL.” Los cursos “Open UTPL” ofrecerán clases, libros, guías de estudio, y contenido de multimedia bajo la licencia CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 de Ecuador como muestra de dedicación de la UTPL hacia la investigación educativa. Michael Carroll, miembro de la mesa directiva de Creative Commons, se unirá al evento como ponente principal.

El equipo de CC Ecuador explica, „El interés de la UTPL es difundir la producción cultural y de investigación. Por lo tanto, hemos tomado la iniciativa de poner en marcha las Licencias Creative Commons como una alternativa a ‘Todos los derechos reservados.’ Para lograrlo se ha tenido que pasar por un proceso de adaptación de la licencia internacional a nuestra legislación, con discusiones tanto públicas como privadas, en donde han colaborado para ello actores de la sociedad con notoria representación en el campo de los Derechos de Autor, dando origen a este lanzamiento público del proyecto.”

La finalización de las licencias de Creative Commons en Ecuador, disponibles virtualmente dentro de poco, será un tema muy importante durante el congreso anual Los Nuevos Retos de la Educación a Distancia en Iberoamérica y el Aseguramiento de la Calidad. Se trata de una reunión de tres días para revisar algunas cuestiones de educación en Latinoamérica.

Acerca de la Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja

La Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja (UTPL) fue fundada el 3 de Mayo de 1971 por la Comunidad Marista Ecuatoriana (AME). La UTPL fue reconocida oficialmente por el Estado del Ecuador bajo el Decreto Ejecutivo 646, en el que se constituyó como una entidad jurídica autónoma creada bajo el “Convenio de Modus Vivendi” firmado entre la Santa Sede y el Estado Ecuatoriano, siguiendo las regulaciones de la Iglesia en su organización y gobierno.

El modelo educativo de la UTPL se centra en el “Desarrollo Empresarial”, según el cual los estudiantes y los profesores participan en proyectos reales que se llevan a cabo en los Centros de Investigación, Transferencia de Tecnología, Extensión y Servicio (CITTES). La vida académica de la UTPL conjuga todas las dimensiones de la universidad con una filosofía humanista: los CITTES, las escuelas y sus programas en las modalidades a distancia o tradicional, y el servicio a la sociedad. Para más información, por favor visite: http://www.utpl.edu.ec/.

Sobre Creative Commons

Creative Commons es una organización sin ánimo de lucro. Fundada en 2001, promueve la reutilización creativa de obras intelectuales y artísticas, ya sean propias o de dominio público. A través de sus licencias exentas de costo, Creative Commons ofrece a autores, artistas, científicos, y educadores una flexible variedad de protecciones y libertades bajo el concepto tradicional de “Todos los derechos reservados” para permitir voluntariamente “Algunos derechos reservados”. Creative Commons nace y recibe un generoso apoyo de organizaciones, entre ellas el Centro para el Dominio Público, el Omidyar Network, The Rockefeller Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, y The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, además del público general. Para obtener más información sobre Creative Commons, puede visitar https://creativecommons.org.

Contacto
Dr. Catharina Maracke
Director
Creative Commons International, Creative Commons
catharina [at] creativecommons [dot] org

Press Kit
https://creativecommons.org/presskit
https://creativecommons.org/international/ec/

Featured Commoners Jamglue are at it again with yet another amazing remix contest, this time giving users the ability to remix Dolla’s “Who the F*** Is That”. Entries are due by May 11th and the winner will receive an autographed poster, their remix on Dolla’s MySpace, and a phone call from Dolla himself.

Adding to their already deep and successful contest history, Jamglue has made a real case for CC-fueled remix contests as a positive means for artists to engage with the ingenuity of their fans while retaining commercial interests. Artists are able keep hold of their ability to negotiate licensing deals and explore commercial avenues while fans are able to engage with the music in a more interactive way, promoting a positive discourse that blurs the lines between creator and consumer.

On Tuesday, April 29, Creative Commons, the Art Law Committee of the New York City Bar Association, the College Art Association, and ARTstor are cosponsoring “Who Owns This Image?: Art, Access, and the Public Domain after Bridgeman v. Corel”, a public panel discussion on the issues surrounding the reproduction of public domain works.

Virginia Rutledge, CC’s Vice President and General Counsel, will be moderating the panel, which aims to better understand the legal ramifications and cultural repercussions of Bridgeman Art Library Ltd. v. Corel Corp. (S.D.N.Y. 1999). Joining Virginia will be a group of seriously credentialed panelists (see list below) for what is bound to be a vibrant and illuminating discussion that touches on issues of “art, publishing, and the law.”

This will all be taking place on Tuesday, April 29, 6:30 – 8:00 pm at The Great Hall, New York City Bar Association, 42 W. 44th Street, New York City (Google Map). The program is free and open to the public and no reservation is required. With this said, seating is limited and a panel of such caliber will undoubtedly fill up quickly so be sure to arrive early! See all the details after the jump: (more…)

After lots of positive feedback, today we’re removing the “draft” notice from our Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses. Not much has changed since the draft announcement, so most of the explanation below is cribbed from that. Of course just because this statement is no longer a draft does not mean CC could not improve its stewardship of BY-SA licenses — feedback is always welcome. And although this statement only applies to our stewardship of BY-SA licenses, we are committed to being excellent stewards of all of our licenses, and welcome suggestions across the board.

The statement we’re releasing today is part of a series addressing a suggested Wikipedia CC BY-SA migration checklist. It attempts describe 1) what CC does as a license developer and steward, 2) why CC Attribution-ShareAlike licenses play a special role in the movement for free cultural works — clearly inspired by the free software movement, and 3) CC’s intentions as steward of Attribution-ShareAlike licenses, in the context of (1) and (2).

Note that while (1) provides a reasonable explanation of the role CC plays for all of the licenses it develops, (2) and (3) apply only to Attribution-ShareAlike licenses. Anyone who wants a thorough understanding of the contours of content in this age should take the time to understand the movement this statement addresses. However, other communities have different requirements. It is conceivable that at some point CC will need to address the requirements of other communities in relation to other particular CC licenses and tools that help those communities. One example of this — which takes a different form because all existing CC licenses are too restrictive for the community in question (but public domain and the in-development CC0 waiver are just right) — is the Science Commons Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data. Still other communities rely on more restrictive CC licenses.

This particular statement has been reviewed by many people within CC, CC’s international project teams, Wikipedians, and free software advocates. However, I take responsibility for its unwieldy verbosity and any minor or fundamental flaws it may have. Comments and criticism are strongly encouraged. Leave a comment on this post, or on the wiki (requires registration).

For reader convenience, the entire statement is copied below.

Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses

2008-04-17

Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization that has created and serves as a steward for a suite of copyright licenses that enable creators to legally grant certain freedoms to the public and to clearly signal those freedoms to humans and machines.

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licenses play a particularly important role in the Free or Libre Culture movement. This document lays out Creative Commons’ intention as steward for this class of licenses.

First, it is important to understand the activities Creative Commons undertakes as a steward of licenses:

• Create new versions of each class of licenses when warranted by community feedback and suggestions for improvements. As of this writing most license classes have versioned from 1.0 (released December, 2002) to 2.0 (released May, 2004), 2.5 (released June, 2005), and 3.0 (released March, 2007).
• Port each license to account for the nuances of copyright law in jurisdictions worldwide. As of this writing ports have been completed in 44 jurisdictions in conjunction with local legal experts in each of these jurisdictions.
• For each specific license, maintain at a stable, canonical URL such as https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ the following:
  • A license deed intended to convey the properties of the license in a manner useful to non-lawyer humans, including short textual descriptions and readily recognizable icons.
  • Translations of the aforementioned textual descriptions, so that the license may be useful to speakers of as many human languages as possible.
  • Metadata intended to convey the properties of the license in a manner useful to computers — but for the purpose of making licensed content more discoverable and usable, not for turning computers against their owners with DRM.
  • A copy of the license itself.
• Develop, maintain, and encourage software and services that make Creative Commons licenses available at the point of creation and publishing, for example our web-based license chooser, widget, web services API, and OpenOffice.org plugin.
• Develop, maintain, and encourage software and services that make Creative Commons licensed works available at the point of discovery and consumption, for example a web search interface and browser plugins.
• Participate in standards efforts that facilitate the software and services above, for example the World Wide Web Consortium.
• Maintain close contact with the communities that use Creative Commons licenses to ensure the licenses and associated tools are serving the communities well.
• Educate the public about the licenses and associated tools.

Millions of creators and users expect Creative Commons to undertake these stewardship activities, and we recognize and attempt to follow through with this great responsibility. The responsibility to communities using Attribution-ShareAlike licenses is even greater, as many in those communities rely on Creative Commons to serve as a reliable steward not just in a practical legal and technical sense, but in an ideological sense.

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licenses are informed and inspired by the principles and lessons of the Free Software movement. Although certain Creative Commons licenses allow granting of relatively narrow freedoms, in this document we use Free and Libre in the sense used by the Free Software movement. As applied to content, these principles require a license to grant the following essential freedoms to ALL users of licensed works:

• the freedom to use the work and enjoy the benefits of using it
• the freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it
• the freedom to make and redistribute copies, in whole or in part, of the information or expression
• the freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works

These freedoms are taken directly from the Definition of Free Cultural Works, and more thoroughly explained there. Thus, the first commitment of Creative Commons as steward of Attribution-ShareAlike licenses:

1) All versions and ports of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licenses MUST satisfy the definition of a Free Cultural License set out in the Definition of Free Cultural Works.

However, a license without the ShareAlike requirement could satisfy this definition. The crucial lesson learned from the Free Software movement is that Freedom is a public good, and the dominant Free license should not only grant essential freedoms, but protect those freedoms for all users. This is accomplished by copyleft, which adds a requirement that anyone distributing a copy of a Free work or an adaptation (also known as a derivative) of that work grant to other users the same freedoms they received. The GNU General Public License is the dominant copyleft software license, indeed the dominant Free Software license (Creative Commons uses and recommends the GNU GPL for software).

For its content licenses, Creative Commons calls the copyleft requirement ShareAlike. This requirement protects the freedoms of all users by requiring that adaptations of works licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike to also be distributed under an Attribution-ShareAlike license, or a license deemed by Creative Commons to grant and protect the same essential freedoms for all users in a compatible fashion. Thus, the second commitment of Creative Commons as steward of Attribution-ShareAlike licenses:

2) All versions and ports of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licenses MUST protect the freedom of all users by requiring that when an adaptation of a work distributed under an Attribution-ShareAlike license is distributed, the adaptation must be distributed under the same license, or a license deemed by Creative Commons to grant and protect the same essential freedoms for all users in a compatible fashion (to be clear, such a compatible license must also satisfy the definition of a Free Cultural License set out in the Definition of Free Cultural Works).

As described above, the ShareAlike requirement becomes active when an adaptation of a licensed work is distributed. Creative Commons may choose to add language to future versions of its licenses specifying that particular uses constitute adaptations from the perspective of the license, where such may not be clear. For example, since version 2.0, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licenses have included language similar to the following:

For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is a musical composition or sound recording, the synchronization of the Work in timed-relation with a moving image (“synching”) will be considered a Derivative Work for the purpose of this License.

It would abuse the trust of licensors to add a clarification that narrowed the scope of what is considered an adaptation, for this would introduce a loophole by which the freedom of all users would not be protected. As such, the third commitment of Creative Commons as steward of Attribution-ShareAlike licenses:

3) Any clarification of whether a use constitutes an adaptation for the purposes of Attribution-ShareAlike licenses may only broaden the scope of uses considered adaptations rather than collections.

When a copyleft license is widely used, it not only protects essential freedoms for all users, it fosters the spread of those freedoms. This occurs when people who may not know or care about Freedom as understood by the Free Software movement, but merely wish to use works that happen to be Free, release adaptations under a Free license in order to fulfill the requirements of the license. By the same token, if there are pools of Free content that may not be mixed because their copyleft style licenses are legally incompatible, the spread of essential freedoms is constricted. The fourth commitment of Creative Commons as steward of Attribution-ShareAlike licenses could be seen as implicit in the second commitment, but it is important to call out separately here:

4) Creative Commons will strive to enable compatibility between Attribution-ShareAlike licenses and other copyleft content licenses that grant and protect the same essential freedoms for all users (to be clear, any candidate for compatibility must also satisfy the definition of a Free Cultural License set out in the Definition of Free Cultural Works).

While every work that expands the universe of Free or Libre content is important, Free licenses play an especially crucial role for works with many collaborators. Unless each collaborator agrees to contribute under the terms of a Free license, the work rapidly becomes unusable by anyone, as past contributors must either be tracked down, or their contributions excised, before the work may be distributed or built upon (except as permitted by fair use and other limitations on copyright). But Free licenses are not enough for massively collaborative projects. In addition to social and technical affordances thankfully beyond the scope of copyright, such projects need particular licensing affordances, particularly around attribution requirements. Creative Commons took a step toward addressing these needs in version 2.5 of its licenses, but there may be more to do in this regard. Thus, the fifth commitment of Creative Commons as steward of Attribution-ShareAlike licenses.

5) Creative Commons will strive to ensure that Attribution-ShareAlike licenses meet the needs of massively collaborative works, while remaining useful for works with one or a few creators.

Our final commitment is a simple restatement of one of the stewardship activities described above, with emphasis on Free and Libre content communities and Attribution-ShareAlike:

6) Maintain close contact with Free and Libre content communities to ensure Attribution-ShareAlike licenses and associated tools are serving these communities well.

If you are a member of one of these communities, take this as an invitation to help us meet these commitments to you. Friendly suggestions for improvement and criticism if we seem to go astray are equally valuable.

Many events featuring CC in California over the next and past few days.

The CC Salon Los Angeles starts in an hour.

On Sunday I spoke at Lugradio Live USA (slides), as did CC-enabled record label Magnatune’s founder, John Buckman (his slides). Given that Lugradio Live is primarily a Linux conference, we each did a take on open source and open content.

Tomorrow (Thursday) I’ll be on a panel titled Copyright in a Hyper Digital Age: Copyrights? Copyleft? What rights are left? sponsored by the American Society of Media Photographers Northern California. Full details at the link. Free for society members, $10 for the public, or $5 with email RSVP. There’s an event forum in which to post questions in advance.

Friday CC will be on a panel in San Jose on New Media Artists and the Law put on by California Lawyers for the Arts.

Of course there’s always lots happening around the world in CC land — check Planet Creative Commons for updates and our latest newsletter highlighting international projects for evidence.