I am very happy to announce that our Japanese-law and -language licenses are now available for use from our site. Just select “Jurisdiction: Japan” when choosing a license, and the site will point you to the right document. For those with browsers set to English, the Commons Deed will appear in English. For those with broswers set to Japanese, in Japanese. And the underlying legal code is in Japanese.
This is a major milestone for Creative Commons, and I’d like to extend a special thank you to GLOCOM for driving iCommons Japan, to Yuko Noguchi and Emi Wakatsuki for their extraordinary efforts, and to Machina for her keen insights at various points in the drafting process.
Ben Adida, one of our tech advisors, will attend the Semantic Web portion of the World Wide Web Consortium Plenary Session this Thursday and Friday in Cannes, France. RDF, the technology we chose 18 months ago to build our machine-readable licenses, recently became a finalized W3C recommendation.
Today we announce a search engine prototype exclusively for finding Creative Commons licensed and public domain works on the web.
Indexing only pages with valid Creative Commons metadata allows the search engine to display a visual indicator of the conditions under which works may be used as well as offer the option to limit results to works available licenses allowing for derivatives or commercial use.
This prototype partially addresses one of our tech challenges. It still needs lots of work. If you’re an interested developer you can obtain the code and submit bugs via the cctools project at SourceForge. The code is GNU GPL licensed and builds in part upon Nathan Yergler’s ccRdf library.
We also have an outstanding challenge to commercial search engines to build support for Creative Commons-enhanced searches.
We’re happy to announce the winners in our GET CREATIVE!: Moving Images Contest. Last fall, we asked aspiring filmmakers and flash artists to create a short film that explained the mission of the Creative Commons. Our panel of judges has selected the top three entries and they’re all terrific. We want to thank everyone that entered, everyone that helped spread the word, our judges for taking time to help us with the contest, and most of all thanks and congratulations to Justin Cone, Sheryl Seibert, and Kuba & Alek Tarkowski.
The New York Times today reports on a surreal U.S. Treasury Department Policy:
Anyone who publishes material from a country under a trade embargo is forbidden to reorder paragraphs or sentences, correct syntax or grammar, or replace “inappropriate words,” according to several advisory letters from the Treasury Department in recent months.
Adding illustrations is prohibited, too. To the baffled dismay of publishers, editors and translators who have been briefed about the policy, only publication of “camera-ready copies of manuscripts” is allowed.
The article does not make clear whether the policy rationale stems from concern for the moral rights of authors in rogue nations.
“Some Rights Reserved,” by Annalee Newitz.
Just a little over two weeks until South by Southwest, the wonderful tech-film-music conference in Austin, Texas, USA (my beloved hometown). If you’re in town, come check out our two panels on music (Sample, Share, or Both?) and film (Can Copyright Bring the Audience to the Director?) the morning of March 15. That night we’ll have a free party at El Sol y La Luna, a great Mexican spot on South Congress, co-hosted by our friends at the EFF and Common Content. Let us know if you think you’ll make it by.
Annalee Newitz has a nice article in this week’s SF Bay Guardian about independent publishing and the some rights reserved copyright model.