OpenEducation.net tracks the changing climate of education–more specifically, the movement towards the growing availability of Open Educational Resources on the web. In a recent post entitled, The Digital Commons — Left Unregulated, Are We Destined for Tragedy? , they explore the potential of the open digital commons, concluding that open access is the key to avoiding, not creating, tragedy.

They also recognize ccLearn as a part of this movement. ccLearn’s Executive Director, Ahrash Bissell, recently spoke with OpenEducation.net about ccLearn’s and, in general, Creative Commons’ relationship to net neutrality. Check out the interview here.

Both articles are licensed CC BY.

A PDF of Sharing Creative Works, the latest CC comic book, is now available for download. This new format is easier to read and share than the wiki version we published a couple months ago, and is ready to print. Sharing Creative Works is a colorful, easy-to-understand introduction to some of the abstract concepts behind Creative Commons.

In keeping with its theme, Sharing Creative Works is in the public domain. To encourage remixes and translations, all of the original SVG files, the text of the script, high quality PNG files, and the Scribus document used to generate the PDF are also available. Changes to the official version can still be made on its wiki page; thanks to everyone who already contributed edits and feedback!

Created by Alex Roberts, Rebecca Rojer, and Jon Phillips, Sharing Creative Works features a new visual style from our previous comics. We hope you find it a helpful resource for explaining the basics of copyright and CC licensing to kids and adults alike. A customized version will also serve as documentation for the OLPC Licensing Activity, keep an eye out for more info in the near future.

Please download, share, and remix Sharing Creative Works!

vosotros is an LA-based record label that, over the past year, has been exploring unique and new ways of promoting music in the digital age. Ranging from their regularly updated podcast to their monthly residency in downtown Los Angeles, vosotros has acted as somewhat of a musical petri dish, experimenting with a variety of different ideas in getting the music they love to people who want it. We recently caught up with John Gillilan, Vosotros’ co-founder, and asked him a few questions in anticipation of their 1-year anniversary this Thursday:

What’s vosotros all about? What’s its history? How did it come about? Who’s involved?

vosotros is a new music initiative and label founded by Chicago natives John Gillilan and Gabe Noel. Our latest project, The Lazy Susan, will be released this February. We first met in Professora White’s 7th grade Spanish class, which is where we got our name. Vosotros is a Spanish verb conjugation roughly meaning “you-all.” But since it is only used in Spain, it was always ignored. Vosotros is music for you-all.

The Lazy Susan was born in February 2007, when we assembled a band to record one song and launch our year-long residency in downtown Los Angeles. Each month during the next year, we assembled a new band to record another song and play another month of the residency. Twelve months later, vosotros presents: the lazy susan – an album featuring thirty-two musicians on twelve songs written by bassist Gabe Noel.

The Lazy Susan introduces music by “Noelsson Schmoelsson”, “Someone’s Piano”, “First Good Feeling”, “PB&J…and g”, “masunday”, “Saltar”, “My Moon Boots”, “The Carrot and Stick”, “Touhy”, “ump-off Pause Tape”, “How Long It Takes To Know”, and “Our Song”.

February 28 marks the one-year anniversary of our residency at LAND (details here) – and the release of our third album as a label. You can listen to the lazy susan at last.fm and iMeem. Also, be sure to check out this promo video crafted by our friend Dave McCary using only public domain footage.
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The ACLU has begun its first foray into CC licensing, releasing all the content from their new website, marijuanaconversation.org, under a CC BY-NC-ND license. By releasing this information under a CC license (and with plans to utilize CC licenses more in the future), the ACLU is actively committing itself to the notion of “conversation,” allowing for the legal and encouraged sharing of information.

Those is the SF-Bay area take note - this Saturday, March 1, Other Cinema will be screening Steal This Film II (discussed earlier here) with an introductory talk by Rick Prelinger. If that wasn’t enough, the night looks to be filled with a variety of copyright-related goodness (see description below). From Other Cinema:

OC inaugurates its 24th year with a festive celebration of the Open-Source spirit! Headlining is the West Coast premiere of Jamie King’s half-hr. Steal This Film (2), a spot-on primer on strategies of access and appropriation in today’s Info Age. Initiating the evening is local hero Rick Prelinger, in person, with a provocative performative lecture on motion picture archives. ALSO: The “Pranks” section of Kembrew McLeod’s Freedom of Expression (a phrase that he copywrited, by the way), narrated by Naomi Klein, plus a heavy mix of media interventions, capped by David Cox’ pop-cult mash-up—get this—in 3-D! And in keeping with the sharewareethic, bring in your unwanted books for potlatch at 8pm with DJ Onanist and FREE-flowin’ bubbly!

It’s no secret that Flickr has a great archive of Creative Commons-licensed photos — over 50 million as I write this. Last week I ran across a plugin for WordPress that makes finding and using these images even easier.

Photo Dropper allows you to search for images, optionally filtering for whether or not photos allow commercial use, and insert them into your blog post along with the appropriate photo credit. Their site has screenshots and installation instructions.

Great job, guys!

Wireless Networking in the Developing World is a free book about designing, implementing, and maintaining low-cost wireless networks. The second edition has just been released under a CC Attribution-ShareAlike license with versions in English, Spanish, French, Italian, Arabic, and soon Portuguese.

For a bit on why a book on wireless networking in the developing world may be particularly interesting, see last November’s post on Building a Rural Wireless Mesh Network, which very conveniently also happens to be available under an Attribution-ShareAlike license.

From the Science Commons blog …  
In a new piece [free reg. req.] this week from GenomeWeb Daily News, Aled Edwards — director and CEO of the Structural Genomics Consortium — describes the drug discovery process as a “lottery,” and argues that increasing the chances for discovery will require that people in “academia, industry, and funding bodies collaborate and keep new structural data accessible to all researchers who might be interested in using it.”

The sentiment echoes those of Science Commons’ own John Wilbanks, who earlier this year wrote a post on the Nature Network comparing drug discovery to a game of roulette. It’s a game, says Wilbanks, that people win by “betting on every square, then patenting the one that wins and extracting high rents from it.” The biggest problem in this scenario, he argues, isn’t the existence of patents, but the sheer complexity of the human body, and how much we still have to learn about it: Human bodies make microprocessors look like children’s toys in terms of complexity. …Complexity is the problem both in terms of our understanding of bodies and drugs and in terms of reworking the models around discovery. This system regularly and utterly defeats the best efforts of many entrepreneurs and policy reformers to change things for the better. 

So what’s the solution? According to Wilbanks, it’s a “commons approach,” which entails precisely the kind of collaboration that Edwards advocates […]

More after the jump …  

LugRadio (LUG stands for Linux User Group) brings their “rock-conference” to San Francisco April 12-13. Registration is only $10:

LugRadio Live USA 2008 brings together over 30 speakers across three stages, 30+ exhibitors, a range of BOF sessions, debate panels, lightbulb talk sessions, demos and much more, all wrapped up in the unique event that the UK incarnation has become known for, combining an incredibly loose, social, inclusive, and amusing atmosphere — if you are new to LugRadio Live, it is nothing you will have seen before.

The show will also see a large number of exhibitors, which will be announced in the coming weeks, with plenty to see and do. In addition to this, the LugRadio team will be recording a live performance of their cult-hit podcast, which has over 20,000 listeners, in front of the LugRadio Live USA 2008 audience - like the UK event, this is always quite a spectacle, and excellent fun for all involved.

Here’s the abstract of the talk I’m slated to give:

Free culture: how many years behind free software?
Where is free culture/open content c.2008 in its development relative to free software/open source? 1983, 1989, 1991, 1998, 2004? Do users of culture require the same freedoms as users of software? How free software people can aid and abet free culture and vice versa.

Incidentally, the LugRadio podcast has been working to effect a switch from the most restrictive CC license (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives) to one of the most liberal (Attribution-ShareAlike) and this month made the announcement in the form of an essay, well worth reading. Excerpt:
After four years of glorious LugRadio goodness, it become apparent that this occasionally caused complications. People have asked us: can I chop out just the bit where you read my email out and put that on my website? or, can I cut out this interview and show that to people involved with the project I was talking about without them having to listen to the rest of the show? Can I put an episode on the cover CD for my computer magazine? We’ve always said yes to requests like these — we’ve never refused a request to do something different with the show — but after some chatting away in the orbiting LugRadio Command Satellite, it became apparent that this process would be rather easier if people who wanted to do creative things with the show could do so without asking for permission first.

Jono Bacon, one of the people behind LugRadio and LugRadio Live, has made previous appearances on this blog.

Go here now to listen to the wonderfully absurd theme song to RetarDEAD, a soon-to-be released low budget indie monster film (mp3 located near page bottom). The theme song is released under a CC BY-NC license, allowing for remixing pleasure. Via BoingBoing:

Evil has come to the Butte County Institute of Special Education, and its students will never be the same. Armed with a fatal hyper-intelligence serum, the mad Dr. Stern single-handedly transforms a quiet community into an army of flesh-eating zombies. It’s a showdown of limb-chopping, head-bursting proportions as Stern’s nemesis, F.B.I. agent Susan Hannigan, and the local sheriff’s department take on the zombie plague in the ultimate battle royale. In short, it’s sort of like “Flowers for Algernon” meets “Night of the Living Dead.”

Jello Biafra, former lead singer of the Dead Kennedy’s plays the town’s mayor. I also sing the theme song duet with Girl Trouble lead singer Kurt “KP” Kendall - and as a backup singer in the “Retardettes.” The song has been released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, so it is free and available for remixing.

Check out this great Linux Format interview (pdf download) with Red Hat Community Engineer Jack Aboutboul. Jack and the folks at Red Hat’s Fedora Project have been leaders in producing quality free and open source software, and have been central in helping CC build LiveContent. Jack says,

“Fedora’s dedication to opening everything is not just for hackers – it has a wider importance in that our approach is an agent for social change. That’s the reason that we love to work with Creative Commons, as it pushes copyright reform: and the changes that are needed there will effect everyone, way beyond those of us who like to hack our computers.”

He goes on to say: “Whether we innovate ourselves, or can enable and encourage others to do so, that’s important. Putting the tools into people’s hands is what we do.” Well put, Jack. Creative Commons works hard to emulate this idea in the development of free, easy-to-use tools that allow creators to share their creativity with the world.

Thanks again to Linux Format for sharing the article!

Photo by Jodi Sperber / CC BY-ND

The New York Times has reignited its Polling Place Photo Project, a “nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that encourages voters to capture, post and share photographs of this year’s primaries, caucuses and general election.” All participant photos are published under a Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives license. This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to the author.

Alongside the photos, contributors are encouraged to submit additional information like polling place descriptions, voting conditions and personal experiences. The Times says, “By documenting local voting experiences, participants can contribute to an archive of photographs that captures the richness and complexity of voting in America.” Browse some of the photos and then help document democracy by sharing your own.

Creative Commons is now offering LiveContent through the Open Source product distribution service On-Disk.com. On-Disk sells a variety of software packages conveniently contained on a CD or DVD. On-Disk provides “burn-on-demand” service and works with open source and smaller software and media developers — “helping low-budget or no-budget organizations publish their software and digital media products with no out of pocket expenses.”

On-Disk is currently carrying LiveContent 1.0 and will roll in 2.0 upon its release. In addition to CC’s distros, the site offers various flavors of Linux as well as educational and productivity applications. On-Disk aims to support the non-technophiles among us by helping bridge technology gaps:

“We tend to assume everyone can download, install or stream live media. However, a large percentage of computer users have trouble with basic operations. Offering a CD or DVD increases the number of people able to participate.”

Naturally, users can still download the CC LiveContent ISO for free from the Fedora site and then burn the image to a disc.

Following up on today’s post on a short about “Cinema 2.0″, made with presumably Cinema 2.0 techniques … more links on CC Cinema 2.0 and nearby.

The A Swarm of Angels collaborative film project is moving into its third phase, advanced development.

The folks behind ASoW have also posted their ideas on 7 rules for open source media, including what they call “Open Plus”:

Open Plus adds more opportunities for participation and involvement in the work whether as a creator, or as part of what used to be called ‘the audience’.

• 6. Reveal the process
  Allowing access to not only the final source media, but work-in-progress material and software files, adding another layer of transparency and documentation.
• 7. Open contribution
  Adding ways to influence and participate in the creation of the original work through various types of community/audience involvement (opportunities such as open crewing, direct feedback or contribution mechanisms).

There are different flavours of open media, and these states can accommodate most Pioneering open movie projects like Blender’s Elephants Dream and Modfilm’s Sanctuary count as open source media because they allow you to access the source files. The recent release of the copyright documentary, Steal This Film, illustrates extreme openness rejecting any copyright and licensing restrictions, but doesn’t provide source media. The same is true for the Creative Commons-licensed machinima feature film Bloodspell.

Next generation projects like the upcoming Peach animated film from Blender team, our own A Swarm of Angels feature film project, and the opensourcecinema.org documentary illustrate the more transparent and flexible end of the open content spectrum.

Open source media is not open source technology. It doesn’t have the same rules but some common properties. It should have some minimum requirements, so it is easier for everyone to immediately figure out how open the media you want to enjoy really is.

The “Plus” part of their delineation (quoted above) concerns the community processes around media creation, a topic often left out of formal definitions of openness, though very much part of the longstanding conversation carrying over from the software world (cf. The Cathedral and the Bazaar). In other ways “Open Plus” does not go as far as the Definition of Free Cultural Works, which does not allow for usage restrictions.

Speaking of Elephants Dream (mentioned in the quote above, and code-named Project Orange when it was under development), we’ve been incredibly remiss in not mentioning two very cool follow on projects — Project Peach, another open movie, and Project Apricot, an open game built using many of the same technologies. These are incredibly exciting projects from the Blender Institute with the dual goals of creating excellent product and tuning up the open media creation toolchain. All of the non-software components of these projects are available under the non-restrictive CC BY license with source materials available in an open format — clearly free cultural works.

Finally, news about two films on copyright in the digital age:

Steal This Film 2, which we mentioned back in November, is now available. Unfortunately it isn’t under a CC license, supposedly “so you can still steal it”, though the material is highly relevant.

CopyCat will be under a CC BY-SA license, but is still in the planning stages:

The focus of the web series will be the Internet itself and the effects it has had on society, US and global. It will make use of pop culture references, wit, and satire of current events. (The humor, however, will be a delivery system for the information, not the end-all of the series.) It will be fast-paced, much like the documentary style of the films Loose Change and Good Copy, Bad Copy. It will use elements of the personal nature of Michael Moore’s filmmaking (following one person’s opinion) with the cineme verete qualities of narrator-less films like Jesus Camp, and it will switch between the two based on the subject covered.

Read about how to participate in and follow the progress of CopyCat.

The two overall winners of the 2nd annual CC Swag Photo Contest are (drum roll please) — Glutinx and Tyler Stefanich. Congratulations to you both!

Thank you to everyone who participated - we greatly appreciate your support. And again - thanks to everyone who helped us reach our 2007 fundraising goal!

RightsAgent, a “provider of copyright management solutions for user-generated content”, launched a little over a month ago with much promise. RightsAgent is built specifically with CC in mind and aims to streamline commercial transactions for CC NC licensed works, giving content creators a platform to “perform copyright transactions with those who wish to license their work” commercially. This is an implementation of what we recentlly coined CC+.

RightsAgent currently supports both Flickr and Revver users, with more content directories on the way. Although a month late (but nonetheless informative), check out this interview with RightsAgent co-founders John Palfrey and Rudy Rouhana to get a better idea for RightsAgent has in store:

Creative Commons itself, five years ago when it was founded, filled an extraordinarily important gap in the marketplace. It was very difficult if not impossible for somebody to give away some rights [to their work] and retain other rights. CC became an extremely simple way to do that. Five years later, what’s clear is that there is great value in what some people are generating online, and the gap we think RightsAgent will fill now is that sometimes you want to give away some rights and sometimes you want to get compensated for what you’ve done. In some context, you might want to license your work freely under CC, and in other contexts you might want to get paid. This system allows you that flexibility. In the same way that Paypal created a simple platform for paying for any e-commerce item on the Web, our idea is to create the same kind of mechanism for the sale of Web 2.0, “user-generated content.”

Check out this great YouTube clip we got e-mailed over the holidays, cut entirely of footage and sound from The Tracey Fragments. It was made to celebrate what the creator and editor, Toi Matteucci, saw as “Cinema 2.0.”, the reuse of footage from one film (in this case The Tracey Fragments) to create a new work with an entirely different purpose.

Craig Neilson writes about his three 2008 resolutions at WorldChanging — (1) Be vegetarian, (2) Walk, (3) Free stuff, where free is a verb:

This year I want to set stuff free, which is easier than it sounds. I’m contributing to Wikipedia, publishing more helpful personal web pages and licensing my Flickr photos with the most generous Creative Commons license available.

This is the kind of group activity that causes massive change. Information can be an unlimited resource when we free it - a move that costs little and benefits many. What’s exciting about freeing stuff is that you don’t know how your stuff could be used.

Read the whole article, including some insightful comments on the value of setting stuff free.

Here’s Craig’s Flickr stream, with photos indeed licensed under CC BY.

Creative Commons — wholesome like walking.

Craig Neilson / CC BY

If you remember Manu Sporny’s Intro to the Semantic Web … for noobs, released on December 25 and that whetted your appetite for something more technical, Manu has just released a video intro to RDFa, one of the metadata technologies Creative Commons is using. Like the previous video, this one and its source material is licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike.

After an intense 3 months, the 2007 annual fundraising campaign has come to a close. And what a close it has been — $601,976 raised! The amount, however, is not nearly as noteworthy as the global participation that occurred in order for this campaign to be successful. The map above, displayed on our home page throughout the campaign, shows the geographic distribution of contributors. This is truly a community supported organization. Thank you to everyone who helped us surpass our campaign goal and more importantly thank you for your commitment to keeping culture free.