We are pleased to announce that Sun Microsystems has pledged $25,000 towards our annual fundraising campaign goal of $300,000. They have chosen to continue their support  of Creative Commons and the broader vision of  a participatory culture, a culture to which both institutions are committed. Sun’s vision everyone and everything participating on the network means that “when people are networked, they share, they interact, and they solve problems.” We thank Sun for their continued support as we will be able to continue realizing the mission of helping to enable a participatory culture, a global digital commons, for another year.

 

If you too support our mission, either by way of your personal convictions, your work, or your company’s mission and feel committed to our cause please visit our “Support Creative Commons” page or contact our Development Coordinator, Melissa Reeder, to determine the best way for you to support the work of CC.

 

Today’s winner of this week’s CC Swag Photo Contest is Naufragio. We applaud his use of the CC and showing his CC pride. Good job Naufragio!

To all our CC supporters who are considering entering the CC Swag Photo Contest, do not be discouraged! There are 5 weeks remaining, that means 5 more weeks of winners to be announced! This photo in no way shapes the context of this contest – we are open to all entries as long as the work supports both your vision of CC and CC’s mission by using CC Swag. Whether that swag is purchased in our store (which goes directly to our annual campaign), acquired over time by attending CC events, or belongs to a friend is entirely up to you and will not be considered by the judges.

Creative Commons wants to thank all the participants and to encourage everyone to continue shooting, uploading

OWL multimedia has launched an audio similarity search engine stocked with 10,444 CC-licensed tracks from ccMixter and Magnatune, with many more to come from other CC supporting sound repositories.

You can search OWL via search.creativecommons.org but its real power is finding new music through music. The OWL website allows you to choose an mp3 on your hard disk, which will be used to show you tracks that sound similar to the mp3 you provided. You can select a segment of a track to search on and of course you can limit your search to tracks with licenses that permit uses you require, e.g., commercial or derivative use.

This should be an amazing resource for music discovery in general and remixers in particular — try it out!

The very awesome indie rock band Cursive is currently hosting the “Bad Sects” Remix Contest. Visit the contest site to download the CC-licensed audio stems for the song “Bad Sects” (from the group’s new album, Happy Hollow. Then use those tracks, along with your own music, to create a remix. Submit your best work to the band’s label, Saddle Creek, for a chance to have your remix used as the b-side of an upcoming Cursive single.

ZDNet has a short and very sweet item on Rice University’s Connexions, a very early adopter of the CC Attribution license:

How far can this go? One of the big problems in college education is the cost of textbooks and courseware. It keeps smart kids from getting the degrees they need to succeed. Connexxions is putting the most-popular community college texts online free, with hardbound copies at $30 each.

Pretty far.

Read the whole post.

The Tango Desktop Project is creating beautiful icons intended for use in free software desktop applications, but usable by anyone (vector and bitmap formats) under the CC Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Old-school film graphic by Jakub Steiner, CC BY-SA.

Via Digg.

Creative Commons Launches Photo Contest on Flickr

Winners’ Photos to Be Featured on CC Postcards; Winners Can Also Choose a CC Board Member to Record a Personalized Outgoing Voicemail Message

San Francisco, CA — November 8, 2006

Today, Creative Commons announced the launch of the first CC Swag Photo Contest on Flickr. The contest is part of Creative Commons’ Annual Fundraising Campaign and runs through December 18, 2006. Contest information and rules can be found on Creative Commons support page.

The CC Swag photo contest challenges people to creatively photograph Creative Commons T-shirts, buttons, stickers, and other promotional items (all available at CC’s online store) and enter their photos by uploading them to the Flickr group CCSwagcontest06.

Two winners, as chosen by Creative Commons staff, will have their photos used on Creative Commons’ informational postcards, which will be distributed internationally to promote CC and the winning photographers. Winners will receive 100 copies of the postcard that features their photo. The winners will also be able to choose a Creative Commons board member to record a personalized outgoing voicemail announcement.

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. Creative Commons licences provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to offer a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. It is sustained by the generous support of various organizations including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Omidyar Network, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation as well as members of the public. For general information, visit their website.

Contact

Melissa Reeder
Development Coordinator, Creative Commons
melissa@creativecommons.org

Press Kit

Today, Creative Commons launched the first CC Swag Photo Contest on Flickr to promote our Annual Fundraising Campaign. The contest offers a chance for people to win prizes for creatively photographing their CC Swag (t-shirts, buttons, stickers, etc. — all available from the Support the Commons store) and showing their support for CC during this critical fundraising period. Two winners will have their photos used on Creative Commons’ informational postcards, which will be distributed internationally to promote CC and the winning photographers. Winners will receive 100 copies of the postcard with their photo. The winners will also be able to choose a Creative Commons board member to record a personalized outgoing voicemail announcement — that’s right, your friends can be greeted by Lawrence Lessig every time they call you! For more information, please visit the contest page and read the rules.

Newsforge has a story about Digital Tipping Point, a documentary on the free software and free culture movements now entering post-production. 59 clips have been posted so far to the DTP collection at the Internet Archive, all licensed under the CC Attribution-ShareAlike license:

Welcome to the The Digital Tipping Point (DTP) collection. The DTP crew describes their project as a Point-of-View (POV) documentary film about the rapidly growing global shift to open source software, and the effects that massive wave of technological change will have on literacy, art, and culture around the world.

The DTP crew says their project will be the first feature length documentary about free open source software to be built in an open source fashion out of video submitted to the Internet Archive.

The DTP crew has shot over 300 hours of footage of leading politicians, CEOs, and software developers from all over the world, and is now releasing this footage to the Internet Archive community under a Creative Commons Attribute-ShareAlike license.

The DTP crew invites you to take their video and rip, mix and burn it however you like, for whatever purpose you like. You can even use the footage for your own commercial film, as long as you release your final product under a Creative Commons Attribute-ShareAlike license.

Of course, The DTP crew asks you to consider joining their film effort, and contribute your edits, transcriptions, translations, animations, and music to the main DTP film effort, but please feel free to make your own video as well. The DTP crew hopes that their footage will spawn many films to be shown twice a year at open source software conferences such as OScon in Portland, Orgeon, and the FISL conference in Brazil.

Last week we blogged the story of a CC supporter who decided to auction off on eBay the historic domain name 01b.com and to donate 90% of the generated revenue to CC.

This week, since we launched our Revverized videos, several CC supporters, such as CC Australia’s Elliott Bledsoe have proposed uploading their videos to CC’s Revver account so that their work could help generate funds for CC as well.

In response to our supporters’ request we will now upload any CC licensed video to our Revver site if the artist wants to donate the money generated to CC. We have uploaded CC Australia’s CC Mayer and Bettle Animation to Revver and encourage everyone to check it out. We also encourage the sharing, embedding, and blogging of this and all other CC videos as a way to support CC. If you are interested in sharing your video and also raising money for CC at the same time, please email your videos to Melissa Reeder.

We are constantly surprised by our community and the creative ways that our supporter’s conceive of raising us money. Thank you. Please let us know about other fantastic ideas by emailing melissa@creativecommons.org as well.

Watch the CC Australia Mayer and Bettle Animation and post it to your own blog!