More coverage of the forthcoming WIRED CD from Liberation, in France. (Rough translation of the headline: “Gil and Byrne release a CD that begs to be copied.”) The piece mentions the concert, a few of the artists from the CD, and other prominent Creative Commons licensors like Roger McGuinn and Robert Greenwald.

Fuller re-caps of the New York WIRED + Creative Commons concert with Gilberto Gil and David Byrne are on the way. (We’ve all just arrived back home after a very hectic and great week in the Big Apple.) For now, check out a couple of choice press accounts from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times (reg. required).

As soon as we have reprint rights to these stories, you’ll find them here.

BBC commentator Bill Thompson, riffing on the ongoing dispute between Apple Computer and Apple Corps (the Beatles), has a suggestion:

In the days they set up Apple Corps they were radical hippies who challenged the establishment in many ways.

Wouldn’t it be nice if they did the same thing now, and made the music available without rights management systems, under a non-commercial Creative Commons license that let others reuse their songs?

It would be a wonderful gesture to the future, recognising that the Fab Four only succeeded because they were inspired by those who came before, taking riffs and musical forms from others.

Maybe it’ll never happen with the Beatles. However, today’s radical musicians may wish to consider the message that wraps up Justin Cone’s Building on the Past before selling out:

Creativity always builds on the past.

And you’re building the past right now.

Share now.

Shape tomorrow.

(photo by Kathryn Yu)

If you attended or heard the webcast of the Creative Commons Benefit Concert that was presented by WIRED last night, I’m sure you’ll agree it was a fantastic show. Gilberto Gil and David Byrne played for almost two hours each, and even sang a couple songs together. We want to thank everyone that came out and everyone that helped setup the show.

We’ve updated the WIRED page with new information, featuring a short snippet from our second movie explaining the Sampling licenses. We’ve also created a one-page comic explaining how the license works in practice.

In other news, we’ve also launched a new way to support the work of our non-profit. Our support page carries several ways to give to the organization: you can become a Commoner and obtain varying levels of merchandise for your donation, you can donate directly, and you can buy t-shirts from us or cafepress.

Thanks to the Ken and the team at Smartley-Dunn, we’re pleased to announce that our upcoming concert this Tuesday night in New York City will be webcast live from this page (requires Apple’s Quicktime player). Ticketmaster says the show is now sold out, and we won’t be archiving the audio, but the concert will be streamed September 21st, live starting at 8PM EST. We want to thank Ken for putting it together, Wired, David Byrne, and Gilberto Gil for letting it happen, and Apple for hosting it all.

In addition to using our new search engine to find great content to build upon and share, you can also do interesting searches using Yahoo!, who currently indexes ~ 4.7 million Creative Commons licensed pages. Yahoo! allows you to constrain searches to pages that link to specific Creative Commons licenses using the “link:URL” function. For example, these are all the Yahoo! results for pages that link to the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. The linkback feature, coupled with a regular text search, can yield some interesting results:

Here are all the Yahoo! indexed pages that have the word “sunset” on them, and link to the Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license.

Versus the Creative Commons search: Here are all the Creative Commons indexed pages that have images on them, the word “sunset,” and I can modify and alter.

The Creative Commons search engine works differently, in that it’s able to add another layer of granularity to the search, by reading code embedded into the web page. By reading this code (that comes with every Creative Commons license) it understands what kind of content it’s finding (image, video, audio, text, etc.) and searches across different license attributes. It’s almost like a huge distributed database across the Web.

Our search engine is one of the first of its kind to demonstrate the Semantic Web, a vision led by Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web.

Today Robert Greenwald announced the release of footage from his controversial film Outfoxed under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. The release of his earlier film, Uncovered, will follow soon.

Says Greenwald:

In making Outfoxed and Uncovered, I learned how cumbersome and expensive it can be to license footage from news organizations. Creative Commons licenses allow me as a filmmaker to know immediately how I can use a piece of content in my films. I could think of no better way to walk the talk myself than by releasing the interviews from Outfoxed and Uncovered under a license that allows other filmmakers to use my material in new and creative ways. I look forward to seeing what others do with these interviews.

As you know (or at least I hope you do), Creative Commons is a nonpartisan organization. What excites us about this announcement is not Greenwald’s content or viewpoint, but rather the fact that a prominent political speaker has realized that “all rights reserved” copyright might not serve his goals. Like pretty much all expression, political speech is automatically copyrighted when fixed in a medium. And yet political speech’s reason-for-being is to be heard far and wide. Whether in the form of campaign pamphlet, polemical movie, or protest song, core expression is perfectly suited to online distribution. It’s also perfect for interaction: You’ve got to be able to use an adversary’s speech to rebut it. In the digital age, that often means copying and re-framing a piece of media. Fair use provides some cover for this kind of thing, but political debate should be settled on its merits, not by copyright litigation prodecure.

We’d be thrilled, especially in the middle of this campaign season, if people across the political spectrum — conservative or liberal, pro- or anti-Fox — followed Greenwald’s lead, or took him up on his offer to interact with and even try to rebut his film.

Get the footage. Check out the torrent, via Torrentocracy.

Acclaimed musician and artist David Byrne will take the stage with Gilberto Gil, Brazil’s Minister of Culture and pop music legend, at The Town Hall in New York City on September 21st. Byrne and Gil, performing together for the first time, are uniting for a concert presented by WIRED Magazine to benefit Creative Commons, an innovative nonprofit that offers a new approach to creativity and copyright in the digital age ae an approach that respects authors’ rights both to control their work and share it on their own terms. Building on the “all rights reserved” of traditional copyright, Creative Commons has designed a voluntary system of “some rights reserved” protection.

“The understandable legal battle over music file sharing is strangling the creative potential of the Internet,” said Lawrence Lessig, Chair of Creative Commons and WIRED Magazine columnist. “While we should respect the rights of artists who don’t want their work used without permission, we should also make it easier for artists to mark their works with the freedoms they want it to carry, so that other creators can spread their creativity. The support of WIRED and artists such as David Byrne and Gilberto Gil will help us focus attention on this extraordinary opportunity, and encourage other artists to participate.”

Launched in 2002, Creative Commons provides two principal services, both free of charge. First, Creative Commons offers legal tools that help authors and artists explicitly permit certain uses of their work. A photographer might invite noncommercial sharing of an image of the Eiffel Tower, for example. Second, using a unique Web search technology, it helps other people find such artists and their work. For example, a documentary filmmaker might search Creative Commons for “all photographs of the Eiffel Tower free for noncommercial use,” and locate content posted anywhere on the Web meeting those criteria. Together, these tools help free the creative process from unnecessary legal friction and doubt.

“Until now the music industry has had to choose between two poor legal extremes: enforcing restrictive copyright protection or tolerating piracy,” said Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of WIRED Magazine. “The great underexplored middle ground between them is “some rights reserved”, which reflects today’s real-world relationship between artists and consumers, where file sharing can be good marketing and sampling an homage. Many artists recognize this and simply lack an easy legal way to expressly permit it and decriminalize their fans. Creative Commons aims to provide that, and in doing so offers an important step towards an intellectual property rights framework for the 21st century.”

Concert Details
Who: David Byrne (www.davidbyrne.com) and Gilberto Gil (www.gilbertogil.com.br)
What: WIRED presents the Creative Commons benefit concert
When: Tuesday, September 21, 2004 | 8:00 p.m. EST
Where: The Town Hall, New York City [123 West 43rd Street, btw. 6/7th Avenues]
Tickets: Available at Ticketmaster (513) 562-4949 or online via www.ticketmaster.com
Also available at the Town Hall Box Office, www.the-townhall-nyc.org
Orchestra and loge seating tickets are $75.00; Balcony seats are $45.00-$55.00
LIVE Webcast:

The event will be Webcast LIVE 8-11 p.m. EST September 21 via a custom-skinned QuickTime player featuring live audio streamed in high-quality MPEG4/AAC audio, along with a slideshow of photos that will be shot and published via the player as the event occurs. QuickTime player will be available on www.creativecommons.org starting Wednesday, September 15.

About WIRED Magazine

WIRED is a monthly magazine that chronicles the people, companies, technologies, and ideas that are transforming the world around us. Each month, WIRED delivers a glimpse into the future of business, science, entertainment, education, culture, and politics.

Press Contacts: TJ Snyder Devon McMahon
PR21 for WIRED PR21 for WIRED
415-369-8118 415-369-8110
tj.snyder@pr21.com devon.mcmahon@pr21.com

Open copyright licensing of interviews from the controversial documentary Outfoxed prompts the nonprofit to invite political speakers of all stripes to share their expression during Campaign 2004

Los Angeles and San Francisco, USA – Robert Greenwald, director and producer of the documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, announced today the release of the film’s original footage under a Creative Commons “some rights reserved” copyright license.

The film, which has drawn attention for its pointed critique of Fox News, consists largely of interviews with former Fox employees and news guests. Under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus license, these interviews can now be shared legally on P2P networks or publicly performed for noncommercial purposes. Greenwald has even invited viewers to transform or re-edit his original footage or use it in their own films under the terms of the license. Footage from another Greenwald documentary, Uncovered: The War on Iraq, will also be available soon, Greenwald said.

“In making Outfoxed and Uncovered, I learned how cumbersome and expensive it can be to license footage from news organizations. Creative Commons licenses allow me as a filmmaker to know immediately how I can use a piece of content in my films,” said Greenwald. “I could think of no better way to walk the talk myself than by releasing the interviews from Outfoxed and Uncovered under a license that allows other filmmakers to use my material in new and creative ways. I look forward to seeing what others do with these interviews.”

Greenwald’s announcement prompted Creative Commons, a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to the legal sharing and re-use of creative works, to call upon authors and artists across the political spectrum to follow suit during this election season.

“We’d be delighted to see other films and footage ( liberal or conservative, favorable towards or critical of any media outlet or public policy ( free to share under Creative Commons licenses,” said Glenn Otis Brown, executive director of Creative Commons. “Political speech is meant to be heard far and wide. Whether in the form of campaign pamphlet, polemical movie, or protest song, core expression is perfectly suited to sharing online.”

The interviews from Outfoxed are now available for free download from the Internet Archive (http://archive.org) via Torrentocracy (http://torrentocracy.com), a cutting-edge tool combining BitTorrent, RSS, and traditional broadcast technologies.

Since its release in theaters and on DVD last month, Outfoxed has remained on Amazon.com’s top ten best-seller list.

About Creative Commons

A nonprofit corporation launched in late 2002, Creative Commons promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works-whether owned or in the public domain-by empowering authors and audiences. It is sustained by the generous support of the Center for the Public Domain, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Omidyar Network Fund, and the Hewlett Foundation.

For general information, visit https://creativecommons.org.

About Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism

Outfoxed “examines how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, have been running a ‘race to the bottom’ in television news. This film provides
an in-depth look at Fox News and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations
taking control of the public’s right to know.”

Outfoxed has sold over 100,000 DVDs since it’s release online in July and is currently in theaters nationwide.

For more information, visit http://outfoxed.org/.

About Uncovered: The War on Iraq

In his documentary feature, Uncovered: The War on Iraq, filmmaker Robert Greenwald “chronicles the Bush Administration’s determined quest to invade Iraq following the events of September 11, 2001. The film deconstructs the administration’s case for war through interviews with U.S intelligence and defense officials.”

For more information, visit http://www.truthuncovered.com.

About the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) public nonprofit that was founded to build an “Internet library,” with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to build more well rounded collections, like its Open Source Music and Open Source Movies catalogs.

For more information, visit http://archive.org.

About Torrentocracy

Torrentocracy (pronounced like the word “democracy”) “is a combination of RSS, BitTorrent, your television, and your remote control. In effect, it gives any properly motivated person or entity the ability to have their own TV station. By running Torrentocracy on a computer connected to your television, you not only become a viewer of any available content from the internet, but you also become a part of a vast grass roots media distribution network. This is not about the illegal distribution of media, but rather, about enabling an entirely new way to receive the video which you watch on your TV.”

For more information, visit http://torrentocracy.com.

Contact

Glenn Otis Brown
Executive Director
Creative Commons
glenn@creativecommons.org
1-415-946-3065

Jim Gilliam
Co-Producer
Outfoxed
jim@gilliam.com
1-310-562-2383

Stewart Cheifet
Director of Collections
Internet Archive
stewart@archive.org
1-415-561-6767

Gary Lerhaupt
Torrentocracy.com
gary@lerhaupt.com

Press Kit

https://creativecommons.org/presskit/

We’ve written about iRATE radio and Magnatune several times in the past, including together.

Now Erik Möller writes a nice article about discovering Magnatune artist William Brooks via iRATE.