LegalTorrents is a new site offering 5Gb of electronic music from a variety of labels, all licensed under Creative Commons. What makes this site unique is the large downloads are shared among everyone downloading, thanks to the P2P technology of BitTorrent. Once you download a client and load up a music torrent file, you’ll be downloading the file from everyone that has downloaded the file, and as you gather data others will be downloading from you. It’s an incredible technology meant to share large file downloads like these music archives and things such as linux distributions. The technology also has a checkered past due to its use for sharing illegal files, hence the name of the site, LegalTorrents.
In case you missed it among our other many cool re-design features this fall, I’d strongly recommended subscribing to the RSS feeds for Common Content (RSS here) and the Internet Archive (RSS here).
Put them in your favorite blog-/news-reader, and you’ve got a fresh batch of free culture waiting for you every morning.
Well, maybe not on its own. But now that I’ve gotten your attention with that spammish subject line, you might want to check out John Henshaw’s tips for avoiding spam at Family Resource, licensed under a Creative Commons license — which means you can copy and send them to everyone in your address book.
Thanks to Common Content‘s snazzy RSS feed for this.
This week’s featured content is PD Photo, a new photo archive containing thousands of photos released into the public domain. Photographer Jon Sullivan has opened up his personal archives of thousands of photos and made them free for re-use. His favorites are a good place to start if you’re looking for high quality outdoor and landscape photos to use in web, print, or post designs.
Customized Classics takes several classics of literature from the public domain, and weaves names of your choosing directly into the story to create custom one-off printings of your books. It’s a clever (and commercial) use of freely available works.
Why: One Year Anniversary of the Creative Commons tools and licenses.
When: Sunday, December 14, 6:00 – 9:00 pm.
Where: 111 Minna Gallery, 111 Minna Street, San Francisco, CA. (View Map).
What:
- An address by Lawrence Lessig
- The sequel to the first Creative Commons animated hit, “Get Creative“
- Special guests
- CC Tunes
- Appetizers & Drinks
Space is limited, so RSVP, please! — commonsbash@yahoo.com
In celebration of Project Gutenberg‘s 10,000th book release, founder Michael Hart and CEO Greg Newby are planning a series of events to commemorate the milestone. Starting tomorrow with a lecture at the Golden Gate Club and finishing up this week with an appearance on TechTV.
Along with the annoucement they’re offering all 10,000 books as a downloadable DVD disc image, ready for burning.
CERSA (Research Center in Administrative Science) will lead the license translation and work to expand global access to French culture.
Palo Alto, USA; Paris, FRANCE; Tokyo, JAPAN — Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to building a body of creative works free for copying and re-use, announced today the expansion of its International Commons (iCommons) project to France. CERSA, a French research center dedicated to administrative sciences, will lead the effort.
“We’re very excited to have CERSA lead iCommons in France,” said Lawrence Lessig, Chairman of Creative Commons and professor of law at Stanford, from Tokyo, where he is promoting Creative Commons’ international projects this week. “France is the latest country to join our most exciting project — to build an international cultural commons.”
“We are glad to host iCommons and to propose user-friendly, alternative licensing terms to authors. Our research group shares Creative Commons’ vision to associate digital code and legal code,” said Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, project lead of iCommons in France. Jean-Baptiste Soufron, co-project lead of iCommons in France, added: “We are very pleased to introduce the French version of the Creative Commons licenses. It was interesting not only to translate them, but also to adapt the licenses for full compatibility with our legal system.”
Announced in March 2003, iCommons is Creative Commons’ project to make its machine-readable copyright licenses useful worldwide. As the lead institution, CERSA will co-ordinate a public effort to adapt the Creative Commons licenses for use in France. CERSA will field comments on an archived email discussion at the Creative Commons website. See http://www.creativecommons.org/discuss#france.
France joins Brazil, Italy, Ireland, Finland, Japan, China, and Taiwan in the iCommons effort.
More about Creative Commons
A nonprofit corporation, Creative Commons promotes the creative re-use of intellectual works, whether owned or 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 CERSA
Founded in 1967, the Research Center in Administrative Science (CERSA) is a joint research institute of the University of Paris 2 and the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Dedicated to the study of administrative phenomena at all levels, CERSA is host to researchers in public law, political science, and sociology. The research group in Information Technologies, Law and Linguistics (IDL) works on Information Technologies regulation, governance, normative process and legal modelling. It also develops cognitive interfaces and applications within local and European projects and networks.
For more information about CERSA, please visit http://www.cersa.org/.
Contact
Christiane Asschenfeldt (Berlin)
iCommons Coordinator, Creative Commons
christiane@creativecommons.org
Melanie Dulong de Rosnay (Paris)
Project Lead iCommons, CERSA
melanie.ddr@wanadoo.fr
Jean-Baptiste Soufron, (Paris)
Co-Project Lead iCommons, CERSA
soufron@free.fr
Glenn Otis Brown (Palo Alto)
Executive Director, Creative Commons
glenn@creativecommons.org
This week’s featured content is MobileWhack. It’s a new site dedicated to tweaks, hacks, and hints on how to extend the phone, PDA, music player, and/or any other gadget you might carry around in a pocket. The content is released under a Creative Commons license and if you’re a gadget freak, I can assure you there is at least one new piece of software or tip you can use if you check MobileWhack out.