Tomorrow, Saturday September 15, is Software Freedom Day, a “worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software.” Hundreds of teams around the globe will be holding local events to promote software freedom. Search for a team near you.

Creative Commons supports free software and actively develops a number of free software projects. Tomorrow would be a great day to hack on some CC software, maybe work on a patch or try your hand at a developer challenge. Visit the developer page on our wiki for more ways to get involved!

No matter where you are in the world, you should check out the Mozilla 24 Conference this weekend. This worldwide community event will begin at 8pm PDT. The conference will be physically held in Tokyo, Paris, Thailand, and the San Francisco Bay Area. However, you can tune in to watch via the broadband video WIDE network. Mozilla has also made it possible to pose questions to the speakers and interact with the other online participants via IRC. If you’re interested in hearing about the future of the web from some of the top leaders in the field you should check out all the details.

As of yesterday GRDDL, pronounced “griddle”, is a World Wide Web Consortium recommendation. GRDDL allows one to describe in a standard way how to map information between different XML formats. The acronym stands for “Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages”, which describes exactly what the standard facilitates.

This is important to Creative Commons because across science, education, and the web there are lots of formats used to describe copyrightable works (and in science, much more than that) and associated rights. These include HTML (and within HTML, data marked up as various microformats and RDFa at least) and dozens of XML-based formats, some well designed, others not so much.

GRDDL makes it easier to process data from diverse formats in an interoperable fashion, when that is appropriate. There’s no requirement to access data via GRDDL, but hopefully the mere opportunity to do so occasionally will make people consider interoperability requirements earlier than they would have otherwise, facilitating lower costs for collaboration across space and time in another way.

Congratulations to everyone involved in developing GRDDL, including Ben Adida, CC’s W3C representative.

The Computer and Communications Industry Association has released a study claiming that the value added in the United States by industries dependent on fair use is $2.2 trillion dollars annually, or one sixth of the U.S. economy, apparently almost 70% more than than value added by copyright industries, as measured by other recent studies. From the release:

“As the United States economy becomes increasingly knowledge-based, the concept of fair use can no longer be discussed and legislated in the abstract. It is the very foundation of the digital age and a cornerstone of our economy,” said Ed Black, President and CEO of CCIA. “Much of the unprecedented economic growth of the past ten years can actually be credited to the doctrine of fair use, as the Internet itself depends on the ability to use content in a limited and nonlicensed manner. To stay on the edge of innovation and productivity, we must keep fair use as one of the cornerstones for creativity, innovation and, as today’s study indicates, an engine for growth for our country”

The Fair Use exception to U.S. copyright law, as codified in Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 states, “The fair use of a copyrighted work … is not an infringement of copyright.” Fair use permits a range of activities that are critical to many high technology businesses such as search engines and software developers. As the study indicates, however, fair use and related exceptions to copyright are crucial to non-technology industries as well, such as insurance, legal services, and newspaper publishers. The dependence of industries outside the high-tech field illustrates the crucial need for balanced copyright law.

While the particular numbers arrived at by the study may be challenged (it is the first attempt to quantify the fair use economy in this way and the CCIA is composed of interested parties), the overall points highlighted above (emphasis added) are extremely compelling.

Given the demonstrated criticality of fair use to the economy and the steady diminishment of fair use, is there any reason to believe the current balance is optimal? Even moreso outside the U.S., where fair dealing and other exceptions to copyright are less liberal than fair use.

This is one place where Creative Commons comes in. CC licenses make it easy to grant permissions beyond the scope of fair use (and without ever restricting fair use), shifting the balance by completely voluntary action. This is not lost on leading companies in the fair use economy. For example, at least five CCIA members have provided support for Creative Commons — Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, Sun, and Yahoo!.

Those are huge, important companies, but a fraction of a $2.2 trillion fair use economy, and that’s not counting the world outside the U.S. Consider joining these leaders — your business, or your job, may depend on it.

Our annual fall fundraising campaign starts next month, so keep the above in mind.

If your company is or should be interested in contributing to our corporate commoner giving program, please contact our development coordinator at melissa@creativecommons.org.

Creative Commons is working with Helsinki Institute for Information Technology to create Finland jurisdiction-specific licenses from the generic Creative Commons licenses.

CCi Finland List

Project Lead: Herkko Hietanen, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology.

• License draft.
• English explanation of substantive legal changes.
• Post a message.
• Subscribe to the discussion.
• Read the discussion archives.

More about the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology

Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT), founded in 1999, is a joint research institute of the University of Helsinki and the Helsinki University of Technology. HIIT represents high expertise both in computer science and law. In addition it has close institutional bonds with academic legal science, law-courts and The Finnish Bar Association.

HIIT conducts internationally high-level strategic research in information technology, especially in areas where Finnish IT industry has or may reach a significant global role. HIIT works in close co-operation with universities and industry, aiming to improve the contents, visibility, and impact of Finnish IT research to benefit the competitiveness of Finnish IT industry and the development of the Finnish information society.

More info: http://creativecommons.fi/etusivu

An Untapped SEO Opportunity: Image Link Love From Wikipedia suggests that web marketers should license their images under CC Attribution-ShareAlike and contribute them to Wikimedia Commons for use on Wikipedia sites.

I like this advice for the obvious reason (encouraging CC licensing, especially under a liberal CC license), but the remarkable thing is that following this “Search Engine Optimization” advice contributes to the greater good. This is largely a testament to the robustness of the Wikipedia community. As I said regarding similar but broader advice earlier this year in Creative Commons for Newspapers, Scientists, Film students and Wikipedia SEOers(!?):

Apart from the CC recommendation, this last article really points to the benefits of the Wikipedia community. Normally ’search engine optimization’ is associated with people basically attempting to scam the search engines’ anti-spam defenses, but most of the article’s tips on participating in Wikipedia are for the good — it’s hard to get any value out of Wikipedia without adding value for others, i.e., it’s hard to scam the Wikipedia community.

A late report on Bandwidth 2007, “The “Music | Technology Conference” held in San Francisco August 17-18.

I moderated “The DRM Panel”, retitled from “Mano-A-Mano: The DRM Panel”, as it seemed the panelists would largely be in agreement. This was the case. None of the panelists were tied to a hard-core anti-DRM position or a die-hard DRM defense. Most were involved in businesses that serve as intermediaries between labels and online distribution.

There was broad agreement that in music, there has been a seismic shift away from DRM, for entirely pragmatic reasons — DRM is a pain for consumers, so has driven some to filesharing, concentration on protection has meant that the industry has not built services that use technology to provide value to consumers, leaving the likes of MySpace and Apple to slowly fill the gap.

One interesting observation was that the decline in CD sales is creating an opening for those in the industry who have been clamoring for a different approach for years. The alternative would be more circling the wagons with DRM, but that has already been tried.

There are many smart, progressive people in the music industry — we’ve seen a number of them experimenting with using CC licensing as part of their strategy — but it was cool to hear that they may be finally gaining the upper hand. There has of course been a ton of “Music 2.0” innovation happening at the edges for years, but there’s no reason that shouldn’t kick into a higher gear with the involvement of and non-persecution by the majors.

We didn’t discuss this on the panel, but during the pre-panel preparation there seemed to be agreement that although DRM is on its way out for music, the movie industry would stick with DRM for a long time. My question, if there had been time, would have been “DRM didn’t work for the music industry, so why does the movie industry think its experience will be any different?” I’m still wondering about that.

CC Creative Director Eric Steuer was on a later panel called “Sue Me, Sue You, Sue Everybody!” in which there was a pretty strong consensus that suing fans is a pretty stupid strategy that also hasn’t worked out well for the industry. As previosuly mentioned, the really smart people are going beyond just not suing fans, but empowering fans with CC licenses.

The DRM Panel

Sue Me, Sue You, Sue Everybody!

Photos by Jason Schultz under CC Attribution-NonCommercial.

A couple weeks old, but worth reading: Cory Doctorow excoriates Science Fiction Writers of America for issuing takedowns on his behalf, without his permission, against sites hosting his books, with permission (under CC licenses).

Meanwhile, Cory blogs about another author’s science fantasy trilogy released under a CC license and is writing a column in Locus magazine on why SF writers should use CC.

One of the blog reactions to Cory’s SFWA kerfuffle Letting Crazy People Set Intellectual-Property Policy (citing other recent examples of “craziness” as well). Of course with Creative Commons you can set your own non-crazy policy. That’s not science fiction.

Intentionally controversial (and funny) pointed out by Techdirt:

However, as Bob Lefsetz points out, McCartney’s album looks like it’s a money loser for Starbucks — though McCartney likely made money from Starbucks who probably paid him a nice sum to put the album out on the new label. However, as Lefsetz points out, he could make a lot more in concert revenue much faster. Lefsetz goes on to point out what we’ve been pointing out for years: McCartney would have been better off giving away the music for free everywhere, and actually getting people to hear it. In fact, Lefsetz suggests that he might have put more effort into making better music if he knew that there was a much bigger likelihood that people would hear it and care about it. Where I disagree with Lefsetz is his belief that it makes sense to offer the music for free for now, while you still get a promotional bump just for announcing that you’ll be giving away music for free, that it won’t make sense in the future when lots of artists are doing it. Instead, it seems likely that more and more new models will arise, where the music acts as the promotion, and bands make their money elsewhere. The more popular and widespread the music is, the more opportunities there will be to make that money elsewhere. Once bands start seeing success using that model, more and more will pile on, and people will wonder why anyone pays just for the music if they’re not given anything else of value with it.

Also see from last year What if The Beatles had used Creative Commons Licenses?

And another recent, controversial, and funny Techdirt on Lefsetz post (click through to Lefsetz for humor): 40,000 Explanations For Why The Recording Industry Is Wrong About Business Models.

Behold is a phenomenal resource that “attempts to catalogue CC images with quality comparable to that of professional image archives such as Getty Images or Corbis, by using the social structure of Flickr and image content analysis”.

The ultimate aim of Behold is to offer graphic designers and artists access to high quality images that they can freely use, a goal that is accomplished through the use of CC licences. Very simply, users can define whether or not they want their results to be “free to use”, creating an array of new options that would not have been so conveniently realized prior.

Flickr’s rich repository of open content is not only inspiring in terms of the sheer amount of photos available, but even more so in terms for its ability to allow interesting and innovative resources, such as Behold, to be built. Even more promising is the wider trend to incorporate CC-licensing into new content directories as they are built, a movement that can only lead to even greater cultural amenities.