Lisa Rein is one of the earliest adopters of Creative Commons. Wander is one of my favorite CC licensed songs and is licensed under an Attribution license — free to copy, remix, or even synch to a movie, as long as you give Lisa attribution.

Filmmaker Andy Pavis has made an eight-minute-long public service announcement about Creative Commons and our mission, entitled Some Rights Reserved. Andy cleverly frames the copyright debate between two extremes in the context of a talk show hosted by “Larry Commons.” The PSA then explores an example of Aaron, a musician who goes through the process of choosing a license to put his song into the commons. The PSA ends on an inspiring note when a filmmaker, a dancer, and a musician find Aaron’s song and build upon it. The PSA itself is licensed under an Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license — so feel free to distribute noncommercially, or even remix as long as you give Andy credit.

Several of our iCommons partner groups have asked if they could translate our movies, Get Creative and Reticulum Rex into other languages. Thanks to the licenses we applied on each movie, those are definitely allowed and we’d like to encourage others to contribute to this effort. Towards that end, we’ve put up all the raw audio, script, and flash files for translation purposes.

Ran across a couple interesting bits related to musicians having their songs online and record sales.

In a roundtable interview with the Chicago Tribune (registration required to view), Creative Commons chairman Lawrence Lessig and the online manager of the band Wilco talk about the internet and music. The gist of is that putting Wilco’s music online helped them sell more records and greatly increase attendance at their live shows.

Cory Doctorow points at a recent Cato Institute study (PDF) that shows popular searches on a P2P network didn’t correlate with lower sales.

“Copyfight” interview by Chicago Tribune

dadaIMC, a content management system that offer a codebase for the operation of Independent Media Center sites, now supports Creative Commons licenses for users uploading content to the system. There are currently twenty eight Independent Media Center sites that run on dadaIMC.

Independent Media Centers, like the one in Baltimore, are based on a philosophy of open publishing. Their newswire is open to public use, and anyone can post articles, audio, video, or images to the site. The interface for posting media includes
a section for selecting between
copyright, public domain, or any of the Creative Commons licenses. dadaIMC has also innovated to offer a new logo that explicity signals the allowance of derivative works, something our current license engine doesn’t support.

Winksite is a popular mobile blogging application that lets you both post to a blog from your phone or PDA and read other blogs, in addition to a slew of other community tools. They’ve recently added Creative Commons support for blogs hosted on the service, so you can make it clear to readers how your content is licensed.

Today Creative Commons has begun discussion of licenses in Australia and Jordan. Professors at Queensland University of Technology and law firm Blake Dawson Waldron Lawyers will be helping out on the Australian efforts while Jordan’s licenses will benefit from the folks at Abu-Ghazaleh Intellectual Property. Those wishing to join the discussion can find the links here and here.

Abu-Ghazaleh Intellectual Property (AGIP) is the first to bring the International Commons (iCommons) project to the Middle East.

Palo Alto, USA, and Amman, JORDAN – March 25, 2004 – Creative Commons, a non-profit corporation dedicated to building a body of creative works free for copying and re-use, announced today that it would expand its International Commons (iCommons) project in Jordan and the Middle East. AGIP, the leading provider of intellectual property services in the Arab region, will lead this effort.

Professor Lawrence Lessig, Chairman of Creative Commons and professor of law at Stanford University, in the U.S., said: “We’re very excited to have AGIP lead iCommons project in Jordan. AGIP’s participation is crucial to our growing effort in promoting the international cultural commons.”

Mr. Charles Shaban, executive director of AGIP’s Regional Office said, “We are very pleased to be the first Arab country to bring the International Commons to this region and we hope that this project will be a step forward towards building the digital commons in cyberspace.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Rami Olwan, an e-commerce legal consultant and project lead for iCommons in Jordan stated, “The international Creative Commons project is unique in the sense that it offers new concepts to the current copyright legal system.”

Announced in March 2003, iCommons is Creative Commons’ project to make its machine-readable copyright licenses useful worldwide. As the lead institution for Jordan, AGIP will coordinate a public effort to translate the Creative Commons licenses literally and legally for use there. Jordan joins Australia, Brazil, Catalonia, China, Croatia, Finland, France, Ireland, Japan, Spain, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom in this effort.

AGIP will field comments relating to their specific initiatives in archived email discussions on the Creative Commons website at:

https://creativecommons.org/discuss#/jordan

More about Creative Commons

A nonprofit corporation, Creative Commons promotes the creative re-use 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 (U.S.), where it shares staff, space, and inspiration with the school’s Center for Internet and Society.

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

For more information about iCommons, see https://creativecommons.org/projects/international/.

More about AGIP

Abu-Ghazaleh Intellectual Property (AGIP) is a pioneering firm in intellectual property protection in the Arab world and today remains the region’s leader in this field. When AGIP was established in 1972 under the name TMP Agents, intellectual property protection was in its infancy in the Arab region. Legislation was weak and few foreign companies attempted to protect their intellectual property in the region.

The situation has changed dramatically over the last 3 decades and AGIP today is the largest IP firm in the Arab world, managing the protection of nearly half of the global Fortune 500 firms among many others. As Arab nations have developed, they have rapidly increased the legal protections applicable to intellectual property and have continued to work on increasing the effectiveness of enforcement of IP laws. AGIP has consistently been at the forefront of efforts to improve the infrastructure of Arab intellectual property protection.

It has always been the most generous Arab contributor to regional and global intellectual property associations and has worked in close coordination with Arab governments and multilateral governmental organizations such as WIPO to improve the climate for intellectual property protection.

Operating from its headquarters in Amman, Jordan, AGIP has offices in every major Arab city with liaison offices in Europe, UK, Canada and the USA.

For more information about AGIP, please visit:

http://www.agip.com

Contact

Christiane Asschenfeldt (Berlin, Germany)
iCommons Coordinator, Creative Commons
christiane@creativecommons.org

Rami Olwan (Ammam, Jordan)
Project Lead, iCommons Jordan
rolwan@tagi.com

Glenn Otis Brown (Palo Alto, USA)
Executive Director, Creative Commons
glenn@creativecommons.org

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) will lead the license translation and work to expand global access to Australia’s culture

Palo Alto, USA, and Brisbane, AUSTRALIA – March 25, 2004 – Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to building a body of creative works free for copying and re-use, announced today that it would expand its International Commons (iCommons) project to Australia.

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), in Brisbane, will lead the effort.

First announced in March 2003, iCommons is Creative Commons’ project to make its machine-readable copyright licenses useful worldwide.

As the lead institution, QUT will coordinate a public effort to translate the Creative Commons licenses literally and legally for use in Australia.

“We are thrilled to be working with Queensland University of Technology,” said Lawrence Lessig, Chairman of Creative Commons and professor of law at Stanford University, in the U.S. “Australia will be a vital participant in bringing the international cultural Commons to fruition.”

“We are also excited to be involved in developing Creative Commons in Australia,” explained Project Co-Leader Brian Fitzgerald, Professor and Head of the School of Law at QUT. “There is already strong demand within the Australian community for a legal means of facilitating the distribution of Open Content, and Creative Commons will be a tremendous platform on which to build these protocols and agreements.”

Tom Cochrane, Project Co-Leader and Deputy Vice Chancellor at QUT, said that with copyright law and regulation getting more attention by the day, QUT was pleased to be associated with this international effort to find collaborative solutions more appropriate to rapidly changing digital environments.

“Even within the University, there are already numerous direct applications of the model in our day to day academic work,” Mr Cochrane said.

QUT will field comments on an archived email discussion at the Creative Commons website, http://www.creativecommons.org/discuss#australia.

Australia joins Brazil, China, Croatia, Finland, France, Ireland, Japan, Spain, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and Jordan in the iCommons effort.

More about Creative Commons

A nonprofit corporation, Creative Commons promotes the creative re-use 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 more information about iCommons, see https://creativecommons.org/projects/international/.

More about Queensland University of Technology

QUT is a major Australian university with a strong interest in and commitment to information law and policy. As well as its large Law Faculty, QUT is also home to the Faculty of Creative Industries, which is keen to utilize the Creative Commons model to further develop innovation in the creative industries; the Faculty of Information Technology, which is a leader in information security; and the Faculty of Business, which has recognized expertise in technology policy and innovation.

QUT’s partner in this exercise has been Ian Oi and his team at Blake Dawson Waldron Lawyers. Ian Oi is a recognized expert in Technology and Intellectual Property Issues and plays an active role in the development of law and policy in this area.

For more information about QUT, visit http://www.qut.edu.au.
For more information about Blake Dawson Waldron Lawyers, visit http://www.bdw.com.au.

Contact

Christiane Asschenfeldt (Berlin)
iCommons Coordinator, Creative Commons
christiane@creativecommons.org

Professor Brian Fitzgerald (Brisbane)
Project Lead, iCommons Australia
Head of School of Law, Queensland University of Technology
email: bf.fitzgerald@qut.edu.au

Glenn Otis Brown
Executive Director (Palo Alto)
glenn@creativecommons.org