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Posts by fbenenson

Yahoo Brings CC Filters to Image Search

Open Culture

Forgive me, but a picture (screen shot) is worth a thousand words (searches): Today, on Yahoo’s Search Blog, Polly Ng and Anuj Sahai announced the addition of CC license image filtering options to their image search and also explained why CC licenses are so important for finding images online: Finding a great image online elicits…

Flickr Uses CC Zero for their Shapefiles

Open Culture

Rounding out the week of some exciting CC announcements, we wanted to pass along news of Flickr’s use of our CC Zero waiver for their shapefile dataset. “What is a shapefile?” you may ask. Its a file containing shapes mathematically generated by the thousands of Flickr geotagged photos of particular neighborhoods, countries, and continents. The…

ProPublica Wants You to Steal Their Stories

Open Culture

A couple of weeks ago ProPublica posted a note on their site asking their users to “steal” their stories: You can republish our articles and graphics for free, so long as you credit us, link to us, and don’t edit our material or sell it separately. Put in CC terms, the public-interest journalism non-profit has…

Sorry, Mark Helprin, We Don't Write "Free Ware"

About CC

And we’d like to not think of ourselves as blockheads, either. If you came across Mark Helprin’s bizarre Op-Ed from a couple of weeks ago, you might have caught the legendary novelist playing the guilt-by-association-game by arguing that we’re “antagonistic to the authorial right.” In fact its the “authorial right” that makes CC work —…

The Official Unofficial Creative Commons Facebook Application

Technology

Last weekend I spent Saturday morning writing the Creative Commons License Application for Facebook. The premise is simple: installing the application allows Facebook users choose and place a CC license badge on their profile page indicating which license they want their content to be available under. Alongside the badge is text that explains what content…