If you have a website or web-aware application where users create or contribute content, Creative Commons has a service that allows users to choose a license for their works from your site via a popup, redirect, iframe, or web control.
One may now specify or allow users to choose an iCommons jurisdiction-specific legal port via this interface by using one or two additional variables.
A new complementary service can generate HTML and RDF metadata specific to a licensed work. This service can be used to avoid having to manually build appropriate HTML and metadata after a user has chosen a license.
The International Herald Tribune has a nice story on the explosive growth of iCommons, with a focus on the recent launch in Germany. The Register UK also has a nice piece. Hats off to Christiane Asschenfeldt, Roland Honekamp, and the many iCommons project leads for the recent boom. More to come.
The New York Times has a great story about the painful process a college professor went through to clear the rights for a short, informative video to be given to incoming students:
“It’s crazy,” Professor Turow said of the labyrinth of permissions, waivers and fees he navigated to get the roughly three minutes of video clips included on the CD, which was paid for by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The process took months, Professor Turow said, and cost about $17,000 in fees and royalties paid to the various studios and guilds for the use of clips. The film used ranged from, for example, a 1961 episode of “Ben Casey” to a more-recent scene from “ER.”
As a result of the project, this Friday the Annenberg School for Communication at University of Pennsylvania will be holding a conference called Knowledge Held Hostage that will explore issues of Fair Use in education. The full program features Creative Commons co-founder and board member Hal Abelson. [via furdlog]
Downhill Battle and p2pnet have announced a new video contest.
The goal is to encourage people to make short movies and animations about the music industry, filesharing, and the potential we have to change the system. The right video can be the best way to explain these issues and get someone involved, and as always we like to hit from every direction we can. Please tell all your video artist friends!
Unless otherwise specified all entries are to be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
No submissions are currently up, so their gallery features Building on the Past by Justin Cone, winner of a recent Creative Commons moving images contest.
Several months ago, Apple released the music software Garageband, allowing anyone with a mac to make some music. Soon after the release, community websites sprang up to allow Garageband users to share music with each other, and build songs together. This is a perfect use for Creative Commons licenses, and earlier we noted that the site Macband added our licenses to their site. We were delighted to hear that MacJams has also incorporated Creative Commons licenses into their song uploading process.
So if you’re a Garageband user that needs some drum loops or other song parts to share, check out Macband and MacJams.
The writings of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg may be amongst the most important in the 20th Century but it’s the sound of Burroughs’ growl and the haunting lilt in Ginsberg’s recitals that have compelled turntablists to use samples of their speaking voices. Sampling pioneers and Ninjatune entrepreneurs Jonathan More and Matt Black (a.k.a. Coldcut) have used Burroughs and Ginsberg for a while and continue to do so.
Thanks to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics from Naropa University, you can hear hundreds of hours of lectures and readings by Burroughs, Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Amiri Baraka and others all of which have been posted to the Archive as part of the Naropa Collection. As of this writing there are 147 (!) uploads to the stunning collection.
Burroughs is of special interest due to his exploration of assembling fragments of writings and audio tape (what he called “cut-ups”) in the 1960’s and 70’s that lead directly to follow-up projects by Brian Eno, David Bowie, Plunderphonics and hence the mainstreaming of tape sampling as a music genre. His 1976 lecture at the Kerouac School should be required listening as a background on cut-ups.
Of course the lectures are of invaluable literary value. Burroughs and others delve deep into their personal relationships with various works of literature ranging from Conrad to Fitzgerald, Wordsworth to Whitman.
And finally there is the sheer entertainment value of many of these uploads. For example, you don’t want to miss Ginsberg reading the complete “Howl.”.
The entire Naropa Collection is licensed under a Attribution-NonDerivs-NonCommerical license.
We’ve recently flipped the switch on German Creative Commons licenses. Like the recent Brazil, Finland, and Japan licenses, in addition to the rewritten legal code that is now based on German law, the license interface is now available in German, as well as the licenses themselves.
Thanks goes out to the folks at both The Insitute for Information Law at the University of Karlsruhe and Institut für Rechtsfragen der Freien und Open Source Software
(ifrOSS) for all their help along the way. This press release has more details about the launch.
Creative Commons, a non-profit organization seeking to promote the
sharing of high-quality content, today introduced its highly innovative
licensing system for copyrighted material to Germany.
Palo Alto, USA, and Berlin, GERMANY. Creative Commons, a non-profit
organization seeking to promote the sharing of high-quality content,
today introduced its highly innovative licensing system for copyrighted
digital material to Germany. The Creative Commons licenses, which are
already widely used in the United States, Brazil, Japan, and Finland by
authors, composers and other artists to share their work with others,
were transposed into German law by a team of professional lawyers and
legal academics. Creative Commons staff of the organization’s two offices
in Palo Alto and Berlin collaborated with the ifrOSS institute and
Professor Dreier from the University of Karlsruhe (TH) on the project.
“The launch of the German licenses is a momentous step towards creating a
new and truly global layer of reasonable copyright law,” points out
Lawrence Lessig, chairman of Creative Commons and professor at Stanford
University Law School, who is currently delivering a series of lectures
on intellectual property rights at the WOS 3 Conference in Berlin, the
Wissenschaftskolleg, Grunewald, and the European Commission in Brussels.
After launches in Japan and Brazil earlier this year, Germany and Finland
are the first jurisdictions in the European Union (EU) in which the
Creative Commons licensing-system (proclaiming “some rights reserved”
instead of “all rights reserved”) is available in local language
versions.
By adding Germany and Finland to the available range of jurisdictions
Creative Commons’s international expansion progresses at an accelerated
pace. “We look forward to being able to offer local language licenses to
all European users in the near future,” says Christiane Asschenfeldt, the
iCommons Coordinator, based in Berlin. “Our project leads around the
world — almost all volunteers — display a great sense of enthusiasm and
devotion to our dream of recreating a healthy public domain.”
About Creative Commons
A nonprofit corporation, Creative Commons promotes the creative reuse of
intellectual works — whether owned or in the public domain. It is
sustained by the generous support of the Center for the Public Domain,
the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Hewlett
Foundation. Creative Commons is based at Stanford Law School, where it
shares staff, space, and inspiration with the school’s Center for
Internet and Society.
For general information, visit https://creativecommons.org/.
For our press kit, visit https://creativecommons.org/presskit/.
To learn more about Creative Commons’ international efforts, visit
https://creativecommons.org/projects/international/.
Contact
Christiane Asschenfeldt (Berlin)
iCommons Coordinator, Creative Commons
christiane at creativecommons.org
Glenn Otis Brown (Palo Alto)
Executive Director, Creative Commons
glenn at creativecommons.org
Following many requests on cc-licenses for a list with a more general charter, we’ve created
cc-community. If you have a burning question or discussion point related to Creative Commons that doesn’t seem to fit the specific description of any of our many discussion lists, hold back no longer.
Subscribe to cc-community.
Read the cc-community archives.
Note: cc-licenses is still the best for feedback and questions specific to one or more of our mainline licenses.