Weblog
2007 February
Tech Policy Summit Silicon Valley
The last two days I attended the Tech Policy Summit Silicon Valley. While the panels discussed important issues that impact the technology industry (including privacy, security, immigration, taxes, trade, networks, patents, and of course copyright), I got a distinct feeling of Washington, D.C. transported to San Jose, California — discussion (and fashion) constrained by the possibilities or lack thereof of near-term politics. Mike of Techdirt has more coverage.
The major exception was a familiar panel featuring web 2.0 regulars Dave Sifry of Technorati, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Jonathan Abrams of Socializr and Jay Adelson of Digg, moderated by Kara Swisher. Many thanks to Jay Adelson for leading off by saying (in more words) that Creative Commons is the future. I’ll reciprocate here by saying that Digg (as representative of bottom-up content discovery, filtering and tastemaking) is a big part of the future of Creative Commons. But this panel didn’t really discuss policy.
Today it was refreshing to return to Creative Commons (not that I ever left — the wifi was good), where we help expand practically available copyright options with both more immediate impact and a longer horizon than can be had within an election cycle.
This is not at all to criticize the conference organizers. To the contrary, the technology industry probably needs to engage the political culture (a recurrent theme at the summit), and the same is probably true for those who care about technology policy but are not formally in the industry.
Here’s a photo (CC BY) of the second least foreign panel, featuring Declan McCullagh (moderator), Jim Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology, Lauren Gelman of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, and Andrew McLaughlin of Google:
Bodo Balazs of Stanford CIS and a project lead of CC Hungary was also present.
No Comments »Jamendo CC music portal
Jamendo just turned on a Creative Commons portal for browsing and searching albums by license (very similar to Flickr’s CC portal).
While Jamendo has always been a CC music site, the portal interface makes using Jamendo extra convenient when you care about which CC license the music you’re using falls under (e.g., for remix or commercial use).
If you just want to discover music you can share, Jamendo also recently rolled out The Spiral, a convenient and visually interesting way to explore the Jamendo catalog.
Just imagine if Jamendo keeps adding albums (now 2500+) and features at this torrid pace for the remaining 10 months of 2007…
No Comments »CC challenges community
CHALLENGE
We challenge you, our community, to raise $6000 for Creative Commons by subscribing to GOOD Magazine and having a drink with us at the famed South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, TX. All it takes is for 200 people over the next 2 weeks to subscribe to GOOD. No, my math skills are not wrong. If you subscribe in the next 2 weeks your $20 bucks will be generously matched by Six Apart for up to $2000. So you won’t just raise $4000 for CC but $6000.
DETAILS
Since July 2006, Creative Commons has been one of the 12 non-profits benefitting from the Choose GOOD campaign. GOOD magazine was started by some innovative people who have taken a non-traditional approach to promoting their magazine – and have experienced unbelievable success. The folks at GOOD have been traveling around the nation hosting parties and more importantly raising money and awareness for the non-profits that they support.
Over the past 7 months they have sold 11,899 subscriptions generating over $200,000 which in turn is gifted to 12 non-profits that are doing new, innovative, and great things. CC is one of them and since July GOOD has raised over $11,000 for us!
We need your help to make GOOD Magazine’s SXSW party honoring Creative Commons the most successful party they’ve hosted to date. Cover charge is the $20 subscription fee and we strongly suggest emailing your rsvp to rsvp@goodmagazine.com.
If you want to help support CC and attend one of GOOD’s infamous parties but do not reside in the Austin, TX area don’t worry – your subscription fee gets you into any of the upcoming GOOD parties. And yes all parties are open bar.
By subscribing to this awesome new magazine you gain entrance to the biggest GOOD/SXSW party to date and you’re helping us raise $6000 for CC. That money will support what we continue to do best – enable a participatory culture.
SXSW GOOD Party details:
with Special Guest Joi Ito, CC Chairman
VJ Phi Phenomenon
DJ Filip Turbotito
Ima Robot
ex Junio Senior
Monday March 12th
Uncle Flirty’s
325 E. Sixth St. (on corner of Trinity and Sixth)
Austin, TX
This event is for GOOD subscribers only and is sponsored by Moli.
No Comments »xlr8r tv debuts on revision3
xlr8r tv is a new cc-licensed online tv show focused on music and club culture. it’s a collaboration between xlr8r magazine and revision3 — the internet tv network started by some of the guys behind digg.
No Comments »March 1st Deadline for Technology and Community+Media Internship
That’s right! Students, get your applications in before the end of the day on March 1 (which means PST for us in San Francisco reviewing applications).
As we announced before, we are picking one intern to help our tech team and another to help us with creating media and building up our community. If you want to spend the summer building the commons, living in San Francisco, and generally plugging into one of the most dynamic social networks offline in SF and on-line on the web, then please apply.
For both internships, there are several projects to work on. A good place to look is at our Labs demo/test site and Developer Challenges to get your heart beating faster. Then, for Media+Community internships, there will be some great work on some media-based (part-technical) projects like OLPC and FreeCulture.org.
No Comments »Get 3.0 at ccLabs
We’ve updated the experimental license choosers on ccLabs to support the new version 3.0 licenses and given one a visual and performance refresh:
This involved re-writing the license chooser in Flash.
DHTML wizards, take this as a challenge.
Free software advocates, we understand that free Flash is important, and on the chooser page urge contriubutions to Gnash, a GPL Flash player and one of the Free Software Foundation’s high-priority projects.
Flash hackers, download and improve GPL licensed sources for the chooser.
Everyone else, try it out. There’s a feedback survey at the bottom of the license chooser page.
No Comments »Dabble DB Commons
Dabble has launched a free version of its innovative web database application. All content created with the free version, Dabble DB Commons, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license (the same as Swivel, mentioned last month).
For license nerds, this is a good time to link to the Science Commons Databases and Creative Commons FAQ again.
No Comments »One Guitar Remixed
Ottmar Liebert (you can read his Featured Commoner interview here) pondered that he would like someone to remix his his guitar solo recordings. Ottmar’s music is Nouveau Flamenco style, which mixes elements of flamenco with jazz, bossa nova, and other genres and is released online under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus license (for remixing pleasure), is also available for sale — and its award-winningly good!!
Andrew Gaskins decided to exercise his right to remix using three tracks from Ottmar’s “One Guitar” album to create “Out of the Blue – Big Blue Room Mix,” “Along This Road – Infinite Sky Mix” and “Letting Go – Isolation Mix.” Ottmar’s blog has the original and remixes in a Last.fm radio player. Enjoy them!
No Comments »Version 3.0 Launched
The latest version of the Creative Commons licenses — Version 3.0 — are now available. To briefly recap what is different in this version of the licenses:
Separating the “generic” from the US license
As part of Version 3.0, we have spun off the “generic” license to be the CC US license and created a new generic license, now known as the “unported” license. For more information about this change, see this more detailed explanation.
Harmonizing the treatment of moral rights & collecting society royalties
In Version 3.0, we are ensuring that all CC jurisdiction licenses and the CC unported license have consistent, express treatment of the issues of moral rights and collecting society royalties (subject to national differences). For more information about these changes, see this explanation of the moral rights harmonization and this explanation of the collecting society harmonization.
No Endorsement Language
That a person may not misuse the attribution requirement of a CC license to improperly assert or imply an association or relationship with the licensor or author, has been implicit in our licenses from the start. We have now decided to make this explicit in both the Legal Code and the Commons Deed to ensure that — as our licenses continue to grow and attract a large number of more prominent artists and companies — there will be no confusion for either the licensor or licensee about this issue. For a more detailed explanation, see here.
BY-SA — Compatibility Structure Now Included
The CC BY-SA 3.0 licenses will now include the ability for derivatives to be relicensed under a “Creative Commons Compatible License,” which will be listed here. This structure realizes CC’s long-held objective of ensuring that there are no legal barriers to people being able to remix creativity in the way that flexible licenses are intended to enable. More information about this is provided here.
Clarifications Negotiated With Debian & MIT
Finally, Version 3.0 of the licenses include minor clarifications to the language of the licenses to take account of the concerns of Debian (more details here) and MIT (more details here).
As part of discussions with Debian, it was proposed to allow the release of CC-licensed works under DRM by licensees on certain conditions — what was known as the “parallel distribution language” but this has not been included as part of Version 3.0 of the CC licenses.
Below is a list of CC blog posts about Version 3.0:
Getting to Version 3.0
Version 3.0 — Public Discussion Launched
Version 3.0 — Revised License Drafts
Version 3.0 — It’s Happening & With BY-SA Compatibility Language Too
ccHost Opportunities
The open source remix community project ccHost is proving to be more than an incubator for CC technologies; if you monitor the developer’s list you can’t help noticing the regularity of postings for job opportunities. The latest comes from Brett at Open Source Cinema…
We’re looking for a PHP programmer to help with our CChost install at OpenSourceCinema.org… What we are in need of is some customization of our templates, and a bit of work on a custom module we wrote to take advantage of the blip.tv API…We have a budget to spend on some development, if anyone is interested or knows of some good folks through their respective projects…we’re trying to present our site at SXSW in about 2 weeks. :)
You can contact Brett directly at brett at eyesteelfilm dot com and make sure to let us know how it goes.
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