Public Domain not in the cards
Earlier this year, officials from the US Defense Intelligence Agency came up with the idea of producing decks of cards for US troops that identified Iraq fugitives. Playing cards have a long history in war, being part of both World War II and the Vietnam conflict. The Department of Defense released the cards as public domain and a cottage industry of card producers sprang up overight to sell them online.
Unfortunately, DOD officials didn’t realize the two joker cards carried the Hoyle Joker, a copyrighted image from US Playing Cards, the company behind Hoyle, Bicycle, and other popular brands of cards. As a result US Playing Cards has begun sending cease-and-desist letters to companies producing copycat cards, and the DIA is helping spread the word. US Playing Cards are currently selling their decks as the one true official set.
When dedicating something to the public domain, it’s important to clear the rights to everything contained within a work, which can sometimes be difficult for film and works of collage. We try to stress this point in the Public Domain Dedication process, but with stories like the Hoyle Joker it’s worth mentioning how important it is to make sure that you control the copyright on every part of your work before dedicating it to the Public Domain. [via Workbench]
Can you remix? Want to be on our CD?
We want you to make a remix of Bm Relocation Program’s song, Superego Exchange to put on the next Creative Commons promotional CD. Send us your remix, and we’ll feature the best entry on the CD.
Superego Exchange is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, which means you can make derivative works and remixes, as long as you release your work under the same license.
Bm Relocation Program has kindly made available the song’s wav file, a zip file with the eleven individual tracks, and the eleven individual tracks separately, which you can all find here — or just download the mp3.
We’ll take submissions until September 23rd, 2003. Please email us with an mp3/wav file, or a URL where we can download your remix.
Demonstrate how people can collaborate without even knowing each other — go make remixes!!!
People Like Us/Vicki Bennett
Vicki Bennett recently sat down to talk to us about her thoughts on how and why she creates audio and visual collage, the upcoming sampling license, and the legal issues surrounding her creativity.
Fans of the recent documentary hit movie “Winged Migration” might be interested in following this week’s featured content at the 10,000 Birds Blog. Written by a small team of casual bird-watchers, their goal is to document as many sightings of the roughly 10,000 bird species found in the world. So far, they’re up to 210. After reading their site, I can’t help but hope they make their goal and continue publishing their Creative Commons licensed updates far into the future.
Hot on the heels of a popular web design demonstration at CSS zen garden, No Sight At Night has launched their own redesign challenge, asking designers to create new looks for the site using cascading style sheets (CSS), with all submissions licensed under a Creative Commons license for others to share.
The Textmapping Project is a site aiming to improve reading comprehension by providing tutorials for teachers, homeschoolers, and education researchers. The practice of textmapping involves creating large scrolls containing information. Information presented in this way allows students to get an idea of the “big picture” and helps them figure out ways of gleaning relevant information and themes in a larger work, among many other benefits.
The site itself has a comprehensive copyright section explaining how to use their content and how to give them proper attribution in accordance with the Creative Commons license, and they even include the HTML that users can copy and paste to their documents. They also have an explanation of why they chose the license and offer a list of other licenses that educational researchers may be interested in.
As the Classics go Public
Book Magazine recently published a list of the 50 best-selling classics in 2002, and blogger Eliot Landrum decided to improve upon it. He looked up the date that every book on the list is set to go into the public domain in the US (10 of the 50 already are), and republished the list here.
I can’t wait to see what kinds of great side-stories, reinterpretations, and movies get created after Tolkien’s, Steinbeck’s, and Hemingway’s work goes free.
Care to Remix? Visit Common Content
There is a lot of great Creative Commons licensed work at Common Content — much of it — licensed to allow you, to remix and make derivative works.
If you are entering the Creative Commons Moving Image Contest, Common Content would be a good source of seed material to remix as part of your entry.
If you have Creative Commons licensed works, register at Common Content — that way people will be able to find your work to remix, or share.
Creative Commons Moving Image Contest
GET CREATIVE!
Enter the Creative Commons Moving Image Contest.
Make a 2-minute moving image that describes Creative Commons’ mission.
Win a computer, a digital video camera, or an iPod.
An amazing panel of judges will select winners.
Please read the official rules.