Weblog
2007
Making open standards as open as possible
A great announcement from the microformats community today concerning use of the CC Public Domain Dedication.
Today we are changing the microformats wiki to require that all contributions be placed into the public domain. This means that any page created, or any content added to the microformats wiki from here forward is placed into the public domain for maximum possible reuse.
Be sure to check out the whole post for the rationale and a nice backstory outline, starting from back in 2001.
No Comments »SCRIPT-ed Journal Licenses Content with CC
SCRIPT-ed, an open access journal covering a broad range of topics relating to law and technologies has begun to publish its content under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. The journal, based out of the University of Edinburgh School of Law, examines issues including intellectual property, digital copyright, free expression, free software, privacy and public health.
SCRIPT-ed is “built on the principles of sharing academic works for the benefit of the wider community.” Like many other open access journals, SCRIPT-ed contributors retain the copyright to their submissions but release the specific work under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license for the publication. In this case the license allows users to reuse, copy, publish, or perform the work.
It’s great to see more and more academic journals exploring the benefits of open access publishing! Check out the newest issue.
No Comments »COMMUNIA Workshop: Technology and the Public Domain
Creative Commons’ CTO Nathan Yergler will be joining policy-makers and digital innovators at the first COMMUNIA workshop on “Technology and the Public Domain” on January 18th in Turin, Italy, to speak about the latest developments in CC metadata.
The workshop, organized by Politecnico di Torino, aims at engaging in the international debate about the “digital commons” and the complex relationship between technological innovation and today’s mass usage of digital technologies. It is the first of several events from the COMMUNIA Thematic Network, a three year project funded by the European Commission within the eContentplus framework.
Admission is free and open to the public, but pre-registration is required. Also, interested parties may submit poster proposals by Friday, 12 January 2008, on specific ideas, projects, techniques on the topic of “technology and the public domain.”
No Comments »Duke Scholarly Communications Weekly Copyright Widget
In addition to releasing most of their library website content under a Creative Commons license, the Duke University Libraries Scholarly Communications Office has been posting a series of helpful “Copyright Widgets.” These short, information-packed notes provide some extremely useful copyright guidance to educators, researchers and others looking for digestible clarification on some complicated legal issues. Kevin Smith and the team at the Scholarly Communications Office tackle some interesting and timely issues such as copyright in the classroom, authors’ rights, fair use and digital rights management. Fantastic work — a must add to your RSS reader!
No Comments »An Introduction to the Semantic Web … for noobs
Manu Sporny of Digital Bazaar just posted an entirely non-technical video explaining the Semantic Web. The video and all of its source material are available under a CC Attribution-ShareAlike license for sharing and remixing. Quote from the video:
If you can open a web browser, you can understand the Semantic Web.
CC has been using Semantic Web technologies for the machine-readable layer of its licenses from the beginning and we’ve recently migrated much of our server-side infrastructure to these technologies.
No Comments »ACIA poster contest, case study project, and registration now open
ACIA: International Workshop on Asia and Commons in the Information Age hosted in Taipei January 19-20 (previously announced here) is now open for registration.
The organizers have also announced a poster contest (deadline: January 11) and a case study project (deadline: December 31).
Check out the workshop program.
Citizendium says “Our gift to the world: CC-by-sa”
The Citizendium encyclopedia project today announced it had chosen to use the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license after very serious consideration of all of the options — see project founder Larry Sanger’s 22,000 word essay on the choice:
In short, Sanger argues that adopting the CC-by-sa license is most in line with the project’s top goal, of “giving the broadest access to vast amounts of high-quality reference content,” as well as the main mean to this end, of motivating participants. The project rejected a license (CC-by-nc-sa) that would forbid commercial reuse, an issue on which “Citizens” were evenly divided.
The project will in coming months turn to recruitment and expanding its governance processes. The changes are anticipated to greatly increase the rate at which articles are approved by Citizendium expert editors.
Read the whole release.
No Comments »Welcome to the new world: Cho PD’s track for CC Korea
Cho PD, one of the most successful professional hip-hop artists in Korea, has just released a track in collaboration with CC Korea. The song made its debut last week at CC Hope Day in Seoul. Jongeun Lee, a volunteer from CC Korea, took up Cho PD’s offer to “Remix this, go ahead,” and produced a music video to accompany the track.
You can watch this incredible video on blip.tv and youtube. It highlights 76 CC-licensed images from flickr, and the video itself is under BY-NC-SA.
This project is a great example of the “new world” that Cho PD sings about: a professional musician writes and performs a song in support of Creative Commons and licenses it so that others can remix it. Then an amateur video producer is inspired by the musician to make a video for his track. And on top of that, the video itself is a collaboration with many photographers, all of whom have used Creative Commons licenses to clearly and legally state, just as Cho PD’s did, “Remix this, go ahead.”
One Big Thank You
This past weekend over 1000 people celebrated CC’s 5th birthday in San Francisco, Berlin, Beijing, Manila, Seoul, Belgrade, Brisbane, New York City, and Los Angeles. We are so excited that so many people came out and showed their support for the work Creative Commons has done, is doing, and will continue to do in the future.
If you partook in the celebrations – please tag your photos or videos with CC5Bday so that everyone may enjoy all the celebrations that happened this past weekend. Also, keep an eye out for Lawrence Lessig’s presentation from the CC SF party, it will be online soon.
No Comments »CC swag photo contest winner #4
This week’s winner of the CC swag photo contest is Tyler Stefanich. Congratulations Tyler!
Since we didn’t announce a winner last week, we will be extending the contest until January 7th, which is when we will announce the last weekly winner. That way you can photograph any cool CC swag you may receive over the holidays. If you would like to give the gift of CC, check out our store or donate to our annual campaign in their name.
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