We’ve previously featured Scott Andrew, a musician and blogger, talking about his Creative Commons licensed songs.
Last year, he noticed a song by Shannon Campbell that he liked, which he began adding to, rearranging, and remxing. He emailed it to her, she liked it, and he posted it on his site (this was done before the Creative Commons started so he obtained permission before sharing the song).
Today Scott and Shannon are participating in a 24-hour charity event called Blogathon. The event asks weblog authors to pick a charity and post something regularly over a 24 hour period this weekend, while sponsors pledge money to the charity. Past blogathons have raised over $50,000 annually for hundreds of charities.
For their “Pet Rock Star^s” blogathon site, they’re accepting donations for Mr. Holland’s Opus Foundation, but they are planning to do something a little bit different with their blog. They’ve decided to collaborate on a new song, going from idea to finished product over the 24 hour period, posting every lyric idea, guitar riff, and communication between the two (Scott’s on the west coast, Shannon’s on the east coast — oh, and they’ve never met in person).
The coolest part? Every song chunk: the chorus, the drums, the guitar strums, will all be posted and released under a Creative Commons license, so you can play along too, adding your vocals, drums, or lyrics to create new versions. They’re already off and running, and it looks great so far.
The Common Content Registry of Creative Commons licensed works is now open and is filled with lots of great music, photos, educational materials, which are available for copying or re-use. If you’ve chosen a Creative Commons license for your work, you can register your work at Common Content so that others may easily find it.
In light of Common Content, and other projects working to facilitate re-use, Creative Commons has discontinued its Content Registry. All the records hosted here can now be found at Common Content.
To further facilitate re-use, Creative Commons also launched the new Get Content page, which lists various large portals that host Creative Commons licensed content, archived Featured Content of the Week records, and archived Featured Commoner interviews. Check it out, and start getting content for copying and re-use!
Neil Turner, a student designer and computer science student has released his great looking site’s template designs under an Attribution license. They’re downloadable and valid to XHTML 1.1 standards and look pretty easy to modify for your own use, as long as you give Neil credit.
ItrainOnline provides online training materials to NGOs and describes their new Creative Commons-licensed training kit as follows:
The Multimedia Training Kit (MMTK) provides trainers in telecentres, community media organizations, and the development sector with a structured set of materials to help make that jump between new and traditional media or train in a new skill area.
The kit provides lesson plans, instructor materials, handouts and more, and covers technical training, content creation, and specific topics such as violence against women. They’re all available free and under licenses so they can be used, distributed, and enhanced by groups around the world.
In a great article about the movie The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Brad Stone of Newsweek makes the perfect case why a stronger public domain would be a good thing — for show business itself.
Feedster, the RSS search engine, now understands Creative Commons licenses found in feeds. This marks one of the first search engines of any sort to recognize our metadata and display information about it. They’ll start implementing them on search results and cache pages soon but are open to other suggestions for use.
With “Get Creative”, our Flash movie, we took a shot at explaining Creative Commons’ mission. We’re fond of it, but we think you could do an even better job. On August 1st Creative Commons is launching the GET CREATIVE! Moving Image Contest, a competition to create a 2-minute moving image that articulates the Creative Commons mission.
The 1st prize winner will receive an Apple® Power Mac® G5 Personal Computer.
Contest runs August 1st, 2003 to September 30, 2003. Please return to this site for official rules and entry restrictions.
There’s a good, brief article in Wired News today on the importance of digital editing tools to the underground film movement.
They describe themselves as “guerrilla filmmakers,” independent directors who create for both fun and profit, and they see themselves as a resistance force battling the banality of mainstream movies.
“There’s a world full of weird and important stories to tell, so I’m not sitting around waiting for scripts or budgets to be approved,” said filmmaker Laszlo Balogh. “I roll my own movies.”