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Cory Doctorow’s “PrintCrime” was recently translated in Tagalog (Filipino) and in Hiligaynon (Ilonggo) by Mr. Paul Pajo and his wife Mrs. Lorna Belviz-Pajo, respectively. Mr. Pajo works closely, as technical consultant, with the Philippine trip hop group DRIP, the first Philippine band which launched a full-length album (”Identity Theft”) under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 [...]

There’s of course been plenty of head-scratching and brainstewing over the years about how to build new, viable business models for musicians. Plenty of fingers have been pointed at file sharing networks as the root of all profit-falling evil, but despite the bad press and expletives, several artists have embraced p2p and have started thinking creatively about how to tap into their wired fanbase.

During the Free Culture Workshop at the iSummit 08 in Sapporo, Yale’s Leah Belsky shared her research with Yochai Benkler and Byron Kahr on the success of voluntary contributions. Their study, Everything in its Right Place: Social Cooperation and the Production and Distribution of Creative Works (PDF abstract), argued that the online platforms interfacing between musicians and fans can strongly impact the artist’s bottom line. Ultimately, the study concluded that design features (particularly how well musicians pull on their fans’ heartstrings) can positively affect the frequency and size of donations.

Take stock in a band

Now there’s a new game in town. The Guardian reports that the music execs behind bands like the Kaiser Chiefs are offering up “bandstock” to fans. Just as filmmakers like A Swarm of Angels opened their production process up to paying community shareholders, musicians are applying the same logic and inviting their community invest in their work.

The Kaiser Chiefs, for example, let fans buy shares at £10 increments. Then, after achieving a certain agreed amount of funds, the band will tap into the money to record their next album. In return, investors are given credit on the CD sleeve, priority ticketing, a copy of the album, and a percentage of the CD’s profits.

This model definitely has some potential, but it seems to lack the extra feedback loop with its fans that A Swarm of Angels and music sites like Jonathancoulton.com offer, namely a chance to contribute to the creative process. If bands like the Kaiser Chiefs really want to get their community on board, they should think about involving them more in the area that fans care about the most: the music.

A friendly reminder that we are hosting the latest CC Salon LA next week (9/3/08) at the FOUND LA Gallery in Silverlake (Google map) between 7:30PM-9:30PM. Joining us will be Xeni Jardin, Tech Culture Journalist and co-editor at Boing Boing, and Casey Caplowe, Creative Director of GOOD Magazine.

Both will discuss how CC, and ‘openness’ in general, has been employed in their respective undertakings, touching on the the successes they have had as well as obstacles they have had to overcome, specifically in regards to traditional and non-traditional journalism. Both will be available for Q&A after their presentations. 

Follow the event on Upcoming, mark attending on Facebook, and make sure to come down and hear from two exemplary members of the CC community on their experiences with open licensing. As always, there will be free (as in beer) drinks for the entire night.

UPDATE: We are pleased to announce that the wonderful sounds of Vosotros will be heard at the Salon in between presenters, giving you yet another reason to attend!

I’m happy to announce that dublab and Creative Commons have launched Into Infinity, a CC-licensed art and music project themed around the infinite possibilities of creative reuse. The online exhibition is available now; physical installations are being planned for Winter 2008 and throughout 2009.

Earlier this year, we distributed 12″ circular canvases to a collection of visual artists. We also commissioned an array of musicians to create eight-second audio loops. We went through all of the submissions and posted the best online, including pieces by world-renowned graffiti artist Kofie, 2008 Whitney Biennial alumni Lucky Dragons, Anticon collective member Odd Nosdam, and electronic musicians Flying Lotus and Dntel (AKA Jimmy Tamborello of The Postal Service).

Each time you refresh the site’s exhibition page, you’ll get a new art and loop combination. All of the images and sounds are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license and (as you may have guessed) we strongly endorse the sharing and remixing of this project. You can download the pieces individually via the links on the exhibition page; you can also download the entire project (including the site’s source code) all at once via the downloads page.

Stay tuned for updates, because we’re talking to new artists and musicians all the time and we’ll be adding new pieces to the exhibition regularly. Soon, we’ll also issue a formal call for remixes of Into Infinity’s works, many of which we’ll include in future versions of the show.

You can read a bit more about the project in the press release we issued earlier today.

In January, the Student PIRGs launched the Make Textbooks Affordable campaign “to encourage faculty to adopt open educational resources in their classrooms” in the form of open textbooks and other classroom materials. Read ccLearn’s post on it from January.

Recently, the Student PIRGs released their findings after examining digital textbooks and surveying 500 students in the following report: “Course Correction: How Digital Textbooks are Off Track and How to Set Them Straight“. Nicole Allen, the campaign’s director, writes:

“I think this report helps draw a brighter line between the good and bad of digital textbooks. I think open textbooks too often get lumped into the overarching category of digital books, which does not do them justice as a solution.  We hope it will help refocus all of the momentum for digital textbooks toward the right kind of digital textbooks - open.”

The report highlights the defects of e-books offered currently by commercial publishers. (See the LA Times and The Wired Campus articles.) In addition to being expensive, they are accessible by students for only a limited time and cost a great deal for those who would like to print them. Open textbooks, on the other hand, are free and downloadable, giving students access to their own copy forever in addition to the abilities to reuse, remix or repurpose them under the terms of an open license.

The report itself is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA. You can download a copy.

One example of a commercial entity releasing an open textbook: Quirk eMarketing released “The Essential Guide to Online Marketing” last month under CC BY-NC-ND.

Great news coming in from our friends at CC Australia - the ABC, Australia’s national public broadcaster, just launched a CC-friendly social media space, Pool, which is designed to provide a “place for creative content makers to upload their work, publish and collaborate.” Pool offers users the ability to upload their content - whatever the medium - under the full suite of CC licences (as well as All Rights Reserved) for other users to reuse and share. From the CCau:

As Pool’s Executive Producer, Sherre Delys, puts it in this interview with Radio National’s The Media Report, the CC licensing means that “POOL starts to be a place where you can connect with others, and so for some that will take the form of online mentoring and skill-sharing; for others it’s a collaborative work space, they can download each other’s work, re-mix and re-use, and it also includes collaboration between ABC producers and audiences, and I think that’s really critical.” And in a first for the national broadcaster, Sherre also talks about Pool’s intention to release ABC archival footage for remix by it’s audience, sometime in the near future.

Molly Kleinman, the “multi-purpose” librarian, has started putting together some easy to digest HowTos on Creative Commons. In HowTo #1 she details some very reasonable examples of proper attribution:

An Ideal Attribution
This video features the song “Play Your Part (Pt.1)” by Girl Talk, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. © 2008, Greg Gillis.

A Realistic Attribution
Photo by mollyali, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

A Derivative Work Attribution
This is a video adaptation of the novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Copyright © 2003 Cory Doctorow.

In HowTo #2, Molly gives some examples to demonstrate our NonCommercial license:

1. Using an illustration on a birthday party invitation = Non-commercial
   Using an illustration on a charity auction invitation = Commercial
2. Using a song as the soundtrack to a collection of home videos for the family reunion = Non-commercial
   Using a song as the soundtrack to an advertisement for a Family Reunion Travel deal = Commercial
3. Using a photo on a personal website that has no ads = Non-commercial
   Using a photo on an ad-supported website = Commercial

Visit Molly’s site for more updates on the HowTos and other news relevant to open content and librarians.

We are very excited to announce that Caterina Fake has joined the Creative Commons board. Fake cofounded the massively popular photo sharing site and community Flickr in early 2004. To date, Flickr’s community of photographers have licensed over 75 million photos to the public under Creative Commons copyright licenses, making the site one of the biggest sources of permissively licensed material on the Internet. Fake is also a writer and artist, and is currently the Chief Product Officer for startup Hunch.

This is an excellent addition to the CC team. You can read more about it in the press release we just posted to publicize the news.

Animasher is a site with a simple premise based on a powerful tool that helps anyone remix the commons. The core of the site is a flash tool that enables easy key frame based creation of animations complete with music and narration. In order to seed the site with remixable content, Animasher pulls Attribution licensed photographs from Flickr and Attribution and Public Domain music from other sources such as Jamendo and Opsound. Proper attribution is then automatically generated for each animation which is also licensed under CC-BY. All animations can be cloned and edited instantly by anyone visiting the site.

To get started, watch some of the animations created by other users, or create your own.

Creative Commons uses Semantic Media Wiki for both our external wiki and our internal task and project management system. 

As opposed to a normal wiki where text is “flat”, the text and data inside a SMW can be structured in sophisticated ways that allow for meaningful querying of knowledge statements of the corpus. To give a more concrete example, a list of United States Vice Presidents by longevity must be maintained by humans on Wikipedia, whereas a similar list can be automatically generated via a query inside a semantic media wiki (supposing there are pages about the presidents in the first place). Or in the case of Creative Commons’ wiki, we use SMW to store information about case studies, which can then be recalled in interesting ways, such as listing all Creative Commons licensed projects that use text and are based in Australia. You can see the exact query used to generate that list by clicking “edit query” on the page. Try changing the country to something else to get a feel for how the search works.

One final aspect about SMW that makes it relevant to CC’s work is that it automatically creates RDF (the language of the semantic web) statements about pages. This gives any semantic media wiki a machine-readable output that allows for easy parsing by machines. 

Sound familliar? That’s because Creative Commons encourages the use of RDFa to express license information about objects in webpages. RDFa is meant to be the “human readable” version of RDF which also contains machine readable statements. Think of it as extra-fancy XHTML with semantic sparkle dust. 

Despite some real leaps in user-interface design for SMWs, editing and querying them remains a little confusing. Yaron Koren, the developer behind the essential Semantic Forms extension, has created a “quick reference guide” that he’s released under Creative Commons’ Attribution license. 

Yaron has made the guide available in three formats so that it is easy to print (pdf), remix (svg), and read (png).

Chair of the CC Board James Boyle recently spoke on Kojo Nnamdi’s Tech Tuesday radio program, discussing last week’s United States Court of Appeals decision which upholds “Open Source” or public license licensors as entitled to copyright infringement relief.

The show, which originally aired on American University’s WAMU 88.5 FM, touches on the decision specifically but also open source tools in general, giving context to why this decision was so important and how it relates to the commons more broadly. You can listen to the program (Real Media or Windows Media Player streams available; VLC can be used for the Windows Media stream) at the Kojo Nnamdi Show site.

Last Friday was the last day of Creative Commons’ fourth summer internship program. The staff had the pleasure of working with six accomplished students from various backgrounds and locations. As seen in their active blogging and outreach, they proved to be an asset during our busy summer months. We’d like to thank them each for their diligence at the office and exuberance for free culture.

• Brian Rowe, a 3L from the University of Seattle School of Law, was our Legal intern.
• Frank Tobia, from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Technology, was a Tech intern.
• Grace Armstrong, who is attending Yale University in the fall, assisted our ccLearn team.
• Greg Grossmeier, a graduate student from the University Michigan School of Information, was our Community Development intern.
• Steren Giannini, from Ecole Centrale de Lyon in France, was our other Technology intern.
• Tim Hwang, from Harvard University, was the Business Development intern.

Special thanks to:

• Brian for helping to distill the much needed list of “Frequently Frequently Asked Questions;”
• Frank for improving the curry bot and working on code that will reduce the duplicated code in our licensing interfaces;
• Grace for bringing an inquisitive eye to the international issues in the realm of ccLearn and open education;
• Greg for driving Case Studies, PDregistry.ca and ccHost 5 forward with his mad bug reporting and triaging skills;
• Steren for improving our internal task tracking system and making the deeds and license chooser validate as XHTML+RDFa;
• and thanks to Tim for all his hard work on the Case Studies and Metrics projects and for helping plan the next wave of CC business development.

We were truly impressed by all your great work, and look forward to seeing each of you again in the near future!

In other cool t-shirt news, The Waving Cat recently announced:

Launched: www.IWorkForTheInternets.com Posted by Peter Bihr at August 1, 2008

I’ve mentioned it before: I work for the Internets. Together with two co-conspirators, we also set up an on demand print store. More importantly, though, I just got the website to go with the shirt: www.iworkfortheinternets.

Admittedly, it’s all still very much under development - so far I’ve just taken the stylesheets from my other domain peterbihr.com - but there you go. Also, the shirt shop on Spreadshirt isn’t designed at all yet, and we might have to find a solution with cheaper shipping outside Germany.

Feedback is highly welcome, of course. For the time being, there’s a few photos (with very mixed picture quality) of what the shirts look like on www.iworkfortheinternets.com.

If you’re feeling inspired, the design can also be remixed in C-Shirt fashion. (Read more about C-Shirt)

And as Peter says, we’re hoping to develop storefronts for easy shipping in different regions (thanks Paul for pointing this out!). One option is CafePress for US shipments. Any recommended print-on-demand t-shirt services for shipping elsewhere?

Nihau! Been offline for awhile, due mostly to taking a long and necessary vacation in Kunming and Chengdu, China. Before that was the whirlwind of webby openness at the iSummit 08 in Sapporo, which I’ll hopefully be posting more about soon.

While at the iSummit, the “I work for the Internets” shirt made an appearance, and the concept was taken to the next level by CC Japan’s C-Shirt project, a clever and fun way of sharing and remixing t-shirt designs. At the moment, C-Shirt is hosted at Nota, a “casual collaboration” platform that in Sapporo proved itself to be fairly intuitive and even fit for touch screen development. What’s even cooler is that each C-Shirt comes with a Quick Response (QR) code, which is a type of barcode that can be scanned by your mobile phone. So if you spot a C-Shirt you like, you can scan the code and be taken to the URL hosting that design, remix it, or order it right then and there.

If you haven’t come across a live and walking C-Shirt yet, you can still access all the designs through Nota. To do this, you’ll have to create an account (ask me if you’d like an invite!) and then either pull up an existing t-shirt design or start your own. In Nota’s editing mode, you can manipulate the design’s layout, colors, and text, plus upload your own graphics. Although some of the formatting tools are limited (for example, only five fonts are supported), you can still achieve a good range of styles and effects.

Then, once you’re happy with your design, you can send it to the printers. This step requires some expensive equipment, but for the iSummit, CC Japan brought their own printers. I predict, if Nota has any merit, other t-shirt shops like Spreadshirt or Cafepress will add support for sharing and printing designs through the C-Shirt model. I know I sure had fun with it.

Premiere of the “I work on the Futures” C-Shirt:

Other cool C-Shirts walking around:

“Piracy funds terrorism” by Vlidi:

“Untitled”by Horrorkatze:

“I support Free Culture” by BobChao:

All designs on C-Shirt are CC BY-SA

For all of you interested in what CC is currently doing in the culture space — check out this month’s edition of the ccNewsletter. 

The ccNewsletter comes out every two months and is a great way to get up to speed on current CC news, whether you’re already familiar with CC or new to the scene. I encourage you to check it out and to sign up. 

As always, a big shout-out to CC Philippines for designing the PDF version.

The National Science Foundation Task Force issued a report late in June on cyberlearning, more specifically on “Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge.” It is, in their words, “A 21st Century Agenda for the National Science Foundation” concerning ICT for learning. The report outlines five recommendations for “growth and opportunities for action,” one of which concerns the promotion of open educational resources (OER). According to recommendation #4:

“Materials funded by NSF should be made readily available on the web with permission for unrestricted reuse and recombination. New grant proposals should make their plans clear for both the availability and the sustainability of materials produced by their funded project.”

In the future, ccLearn hopes to see these goals develop into concrete initiatives. The National Science Foundation has an annual federal budget of $6.06 billion and currently funds 20% of all federally supported research by higher education institutions in the United States.

Molly Kleinman, Copyright Specialist and Special Projects Librarian at the University of Michigan, just wrote up a nice howto for people who use Creative Commons licensed material in their work. This will hopefully add to the repository of knowledge for best practices on material integration.

This is an ongoing issue in the community. No matter how straight forward the instructions for providing attribution to a work are, mistakes will always be made. Most times the mistakes are made not in malice but in a lack of guidance. Luckily, Molly is taking up the task on her blog.

Her examples are easy to understand along with providing various methods of accomplishing the same goal. She even has an “Ideal” example and a “Realistic” example.

From Molly:

I’m taking the material I use in my workshops, mixing it up with CC’s extensive documentation, and posting the results here. If anyone has ideas for topics they’d like me to cover, let me know.

Here’s hoping she continues on this project of producing easy to understand examples of how to use Creative Commons licenses effectively and correctly.

We are very pleased to announce that Creative Commons Austria has successfully completed the versioning of the ported Creative Commons licensing suite in Austria. Following the versioning of Creative Commons Germany in late July 2008, Version 3.0 of the six standard Creative Commons licenses is now legally and linguistically adapted to Austrian law. A special Thank You to the Legal Project Lead for CC Austria, Dr. Florian Philapitsch, LL.M., who has led the process!

For a more detailed explanation, please see the summary of all significant changes (in German).

Congratulations, CC Austria!

The Mozilla Concept Series is a recently announced initiative from Mozilla to garner greater participation in creating their newest browser, Aurora. While there are some intriguing inaugural designs, the most engaging part of the project is that Mozilla is pooling the greater web community for submissions in the form of ideas, mockups (textual/visual examples), and prototypes (interactive illustrations). Of note to the CC community is that Mozilla is requiring that all ideas and mockups are submitted under a CC license, making them easily “redistributable and remixable” (prototypes require an accompanying Mozilla Public License). From Mozilla:

We only ask that all concepts and related source materials be freely redistributable and remixable under either a Creative Commons license (for Ideas and Mockups) or the Mozilla Public License (for Prototypes) so that we can all effectively collaborate on the exploration. Again, the intent is not for these concepts to evolve directly into new products but rather to provoke thought, facilitate discussion and provide inspiration.

The United States Court of Appeals held that “Open Source” or public license licensors are entitled to copyright infringement relief.

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), the leading IP court in the United States, has upheld a free copyright license, while explicitly pointing to the work of Creative Commons and others. The Court held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work.  As a result, licensors using public licenses are able to seek injunctive relief for alleged copyright infringement, rather than being limited to traditional contract remedies.

Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig explained the theory of all free software, open source, and Creative Commons licenses upheld by the court: “When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you’re simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses. Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license.” Lessig said the ruling provided “important clarity and certainty by a critically important US Court.”

Today’s ruling vacated the district court’s decision and affirmed the availability of remedies based on copyright law for violations of open licenses.  The federal court noted that ignoring attribution requirements contained in the license caused reputation and economic harm to the original licensor. This opinion demonstrates a strong understanding of a basic economic principles of the internet; attribution is a valuable economic right in the information economy.  Read the full opinion.(PDF)

Creative Commons filed a friends of the court brief in this case. Thanks to all the cosponsors Linux Foundation, The Open Source Initiative, Software Freedom Law Center, the Perl Foundation and Wikimedia Foundation.  Significant pro bono work on this brief was provided by Anthony T. Falzone and Christopher K. Ridder of Stanford’s Center for Internet & Society. Read the full brief.

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