Salman Ahmad is the founder of one of the world’s most popular bands Junoon. A household name in South Asia, the band has sold over 25 million albums, played at the United Nations by special invitation and Salman and the band have been the subject of several BBC documentaries. Salman has now decided that his solo catalog should be released under Creative Commons and has signed a contract with Magnatune.
In celebration Magnatune and Creative Commons are sponsoring a remix contest featuring Salman’s song “Natchoongi.” Submissions are currently being accepted through the end of July.
Meanwhile BBE Records has announced the winners of the DJ Vadim remix contest and will be releasing these winning entries in a variety of media throughout the the year. Congratulations to grand prize winner Jr Eakee and all the other winners. Read more and listen to the winners here. This contest went so well that BBE and ccMixter have agreed to work together to release a lot more material into the Commons so keep an eye out for that.
As we’ve mentioned before, this Wednesday (July 11th) we will be back at Shine for another round of CC Salon-ing. The presenter list is shaping up nicely and it’s bound to be a great time. This aside, we need your help in making it even better.
Our friends at slideshare.net will not only be in attendance to present their phenomenal slide-sharing community, but will also run “PowerPoint Karaoke” (read about it here), moderated by EFF’s Danny O’Brien. To make it all work, we need your presentations! All you have to do is upload them to slideshare.net, CC licence them, make them downloadable, and finally tag them with “pptkaroake“. Simple enough.
We can’t wait to see what gets posted, and are even more eager to watch one another stumble through them at the Salon. See you then!
Come celebrate open source, the open web, and the commons with CC and Mozilla on Wed. July 25th in Portland, OR. Several of the CC and Mozilla crew will be venturing out of San Francisco in order to attend the Open Source Convention (OSCON) and saw this as the perfect opportunity to bring our communities together in real time. Did I mention that Menomena, an experimental rock band from Portland will be playing? Awesome.
Details:
Date: July 25, 2007
Time: Doors open at 6:30 but feel free to come after the party on the Expo Floor. Band starts around 8:30.
Location: The Wonder Ballroom
Mozilla visits [CC-]Brazil
Representatives of two of our favorite organizations recently got together — Mozilla and CC Brazil affiliate Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade da Escola de Direito da Fundação Getulio Vargas no Rio de Janeiro. JT Batson from the Mozilla marketing team wrote about the meeting. Excerpt:
At Mozilla, we often struggle to relate our core goal (promoting a innovation and choice on the web) to something meaningful for daily users. This challenge isn’t unique to Mozilla. One of the main goals of CTS is to ensure that their research and work, which if focused on development, innovation and democracy, is accessible to the average person. In addition to their many blogs aimed at general consumers, they also developed a real world approach to explaining the impact of copyright owners pushing for “permanent” copyright to materials by having 20 different musicians record different tracks from a high profile Brazilian classical musician whose family is fighting to extend the copyright on his work indefinitely. If the copyright expires on January 1, for example, the 20 new tracks will be released on the 2nd and then on the 3rd, the CTS team will promote a contest to see who can do the best remix of the tracks, which could never have been done before in mass because of the copyright. Rather that just issuing a press release bemoaning the problem, their work to make copyright expiration palatable to a broader audience is down right impressive (forgive my butchering of the example).
That is from the first of several interesting posts about Mozilla’s trip to Brazil.
Girl Talk Interview on "Ryan Is Hungry"
Be sure to check out this recent interview w/ Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, over on Ryan is Hungry. In the interview, Gregg goes into detail about creating his art, how it intersects and interacts with current copyright law, remixing, and specifically how efforts like Creative Commons can help artists in a positive way. It is a great interview and is a must-see for anyone interested in how remixing, new technology, and the internet are changing our very understanding of content creation and consumption.
We’ve mentioned Girl Talk plenty of times before (we’re big fans), and if you haven’t had a chance yet, go grab a copy of his latest album Night Ripper ASAP.
Congratulations to the Free Software Foundation on the release of the GNU General Public License, Version 3. The GPL is critical underpinning for free software, but it is hard to overstate its importance for all computing, or indeed society at large.
The FSF took this responsibility extremely seriously, putting GPLv3 through by far the most rigorous versioning process of any public license to date. Creative Commons has some experience in this respect, but we are mere newbies by comparison.
Note that Creative Commons has always recommended the GPL and other free software licenses for software. We look forward to transitioning software we create to GPLv3.
Creative Commons statistics@iSummit 2007
It has been a long time since we’ve posted a proper update on Creative Commons license adoption statistics, so a presentation on this topic was eagerly awaited at this year’s Creative Commons international meetings at the iSummit.
I led off with an overview presentation (PDF; Scribd; Slideshare). Here are the major points:
- Metrics based on search engine queries are conceptually straightforward but highly volatile and hard to verify, but the overall growth trend looks good.
- We’re also seeing strong growth at leading CC-enabled content repositories and strong growth of innovative CC-enabled repositories.
- Upcoming challenges including measuring reuse.
- Big mistake: not encouraging rigorous outside analysis by people who know something about statistics long ago.
With that last point in mind, I’ve been thrilled to be in correspondence with Giorgos Cheliotis of Singapore Management University. Giorgos had been doing independent research on open culture and digital media ecosystem topics, including Creative Commons adoption. He has academic papers on the subject in the works and we were very lucky to have him give us a taste at the iSummit. View his presentation: (PDF; Scribd; Slideshare).
While the presentation is based on a snapshot from early this year, it includes some very interesting findings, including an experimental index based on license choices in different jurisdictions (e.g., Sweden seems to be the most liberal so far), while Spain is the standout in terms of overall Creative Commons adoption.
I’m really eager to see the results of this research published and for future research taking into account time series data and additional sources. In the meantime Giorgos’ presentation is the place to start if you’re interested in CC license adoption statistics. If you’re a researcher with interest in this topic see contact information in the presentation.
Addendum: Giorgos summarizes the main findings on his blog.
Creative Commons is working with Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF) and D&N International to create Vietnam jurisdiction-specific licenses from the generic Creative Commons licenses.
CC Vietnam List
Project Lead: The Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF)
Legal Project Lead: D&N International
Licenses
Supplemental Documents:
More about the Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF)
The Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF) is an independent federal agency created by the U.S. Congress in December 2000 and funded annually by the U.S. Government. Its mission is to strengthen the U.S.-Vietnam bilateral relationship through educational exchanges in science and technology.
VEF is governed by a Board of Directors including 3 U.S. Cabinet Members (the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and Education), 2 U.S. Senators and 2 Representatives, and 6 Presidential appointees. VEF headquarters is located in the Washington D.C. area, with a representative field office in Hanoi, Vietnam.
VEF has been highly successful in rapidly achieving its mission of educational exchange and capacity building in science, engineering, mathematics, medicine, and technology for Vietnam while building the bilateral relationship between the United States and Vietnam. Since operations in March 2003, VEF achievements as of Fall 2009 include the following:
- 306 VEF Fellows have been placed in graduate programs in 69 top-tier U.S. research universities.
- 26 Vietnamese scientists with doctoral degrees have been selected for the post-doctoral Visiting Scholar Program for self-designed professional development activities of up to one year at 22 U.S. universities.
- 108 leading U.S. research universities have joined the VEF Alliance.
- 38 Fellows have graduated and returned to Vietnam
- 6 U.S. Faculty Scholars have been selected to teach courses at 8 Vietnamese universities on-site in Vietnam or via video-conferencing.
More about D&N International
Established in 1992, D&N International is a leading private law firm in Vietnam providing a wide range of intellectual property services to local and foreign clients. Through nearly two decades together with its client support, D&N International has matured from a partnership of only two patent and trademark attorneys to a premier law firm with nation-wide presence and a representative office in France. Its business philosophy is to maintain the highest professional standards whilst providing clients with practical advice that adds value to their business.
CC Salon SF on WED, July 11 from 7-9 PM: Jumpcut, OWL Music Search, and Slideshare.net Powerpoint Karaoke!
On Wednesday, July 11th, from 7-9 PM, Creative Commons will be returning to Shinesf.com (1337 Mission St. in San Francisco) for another Creative Commons Salon! There is a lot of wonderful things in store and it is a great opportunity to meet-up with others interested in Creative Commons’ flexible licensing, technology and standards and informally discuss how we can all work together.
Confirmed to present is Yahoo’s Jumpcut Online Video Editing Community, who will be discussing how their new online video service allows for both uploading of videos as well as online remxing/editing . Also presenting will be OWL Music Search, whose audio similarity search engine allows you to find CC-licensed music through an online comparison with your own mp3s (we’ve talked about OWL before here and here). Lastly, but certainly not least, slideshare.net (discussed earlier here) will be presenting Powerpoint Karaoke, MC-ed by EFF’s Danny O’Brien! We can only imagine the hilarity that will ensue…
CC Canada Podcasting Legal Guide
Creative Commons Canada has just released their version of the Creative Commons Podcasting Legal Guide, ported specifically for Canadian laws and practices. The guide was handed out this weekend in printed form at the Podcasters Across Borders conference in Kingston, Ontario and is available in PDF format on the CC Canada website. The guide is released under a CC Canada Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence.
When it was first created, the Podcasting Legal Guide pertained specifically to the U.S., with the hope that other jurisdictions would translate and adapt the guide for their own jurisdiction in order to assist podcasters around the world. CC Canada has done just that, and you can read what one of the original PLG authors has to say about it here. We hope this is the first of many adaptations to come and that other jurisdictions will be able to follow in CC Canada’s footsteps.