CC board member Michael Carroll asks for your support

Mike Linksvayer, December 4th, 2008

One of the best things about Creative Commons, the organization, is the passionate commitment of our entire board. In addition to volunteering thousands of hours over CC’s history, they’re responsible for the major donor fundraising that bootstrapped and sustains CC, but all of that goes on behind the scenes.

For the past few years we’ve added a public fundraising component, which has and will continue to be an increasing portion of CC’s overall support. CC board member Michael Carroll has posted his public appeal for CC support on his blog:

Creative Commons is asking for your support this year to enable us to continue the work we’ve been doing in promoting openness in the cultural, educational, and scientific fields. http://support.creativecommons.org/

If you support the vision, please help to staff the vision. Why? You might ask. How hard is it to host a web site?

Indeed. Please go read why, then click over to join Michael Carroll in supporting CC.

You can also check out Carroll and other CC board members on screen in Jesse Dylan’s A Shared Culture.

For even more Carroll and CC, read his paper on Creative Commons as Conversational Copyright. Here’s an excerpt for everyone, link and emphasis added:

As should now be clear, Creative Commons copyright licenses embody a vision of conversational copyright. Within this vision, creators or copyright owners seek to facilitate use of their expression for purposes such as dialog and education. A personal anecdote may bring the point home. I had been invited to participate in a panel discussion at an annual meeting of scholarly publishers. My fellow panelists were copyright lawyers, publishers, and others with a professional commitment to respect copyright law. The topic for discussion was the future of copyright law, and the panel agreed that it would be useful to show a topical eight-minute flash movie, available on the Internet and created by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson, with music by Aaron McLeran.

Within the eyes of U.S. copyright law, showing the entire video at a professional conference would be considered a public performance that requires a license. One might argue that the authors had granted such a license impliedly by placing the movie on the Internet. But the matter was not entirely clear. Indeed, in a preparatory conference call, one panelist asked about clearing the rights to show the video. Another panelist quickly rejoined, “Not a problem. It’s released under a Creative Commons license.” No further action was required to comply with the law. In this way, Creative Commons licenses enable creators to reach a wide audience and save busy audience members the time and effort of seeking permission to share the creators’ work. And, as it turned out, showing the video helped stimulate a very active and engaged dialog among the panelists and between the panel and the audience.

Yes, it is “Not a problem”, and CC does host a website, among other things. It costs money to make complex problems tractable. Please join Michael Carroll and the rest of our board in supporting Creative Commons.

Bulgarian President Chooses CC BY ND

Michelle Thorne, December 4th, 2008

The official website of the Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov is now available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 Bulgarian license. Bulgaria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been releasing its material under the same license since 2006, but ordinarily, these websites would be under full copyright, explains CC Bulgaria Project Lead Veni Markovski.

“Bulgaria has taken a step in the right direction to complete its image as a country where the politicians are aware of the most advanced technologies and use them for the good of the society,” Veni adds.

Government leaders in other countries are also choosing similar paths. The Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan licenses his official website under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license, and governments in Australia and Mexico (pdf) use and recommend CC. Another licensing decision already bearing fruit is Change.gov, the website of US president-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, which is published under the most permissive of Creative Commons copyright licenses - CC Attribution 3.0 Unported.

For a listing of more governmental uses of CC, please visit our wiki page: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Government_use_of_CC_licenses.

Commons Crossroads: CC Asia-Pacific Conference 2009

Michelle Thorne, December 4th, 2008

Regional collaborations are strengthening CC projects worldwide. Regular conferences and outreach, coordinated on a regional level by CC Project Leads, are bringing visibility to local initiatives and promoting the ideals of sharing and free culture worldwide. Previous meetings have yielded clearer strategies and collaborations, as demonstrated by the recent Latam Commons, the growing COMMUNIA network, and last year’s successful ACIA workshop in Taipel.

CC Asia and Pacific community will be pleased to learn that another conference is in the works. From CC Philippines:

AN INVITATION TO PARTICIPATE

You are cordially invited to attend and participate in the regional conference of Creative Commons in Asia and the Pacific in the Philippines on 5-6 February 2009 to be hosted by the Arellano University School of Law, Lead Public Institution of Creative Commons – Philippines. The principal venue for the event will be at the Coral Ballroom of the Manila Pavillon Hotel situated at the heart of the City of Manila.

The conference aims (a) to showcase the various initiatives of Creative Commons in Asia and the Pacific and (b) for the stakeholders to get together in a forum to define the roadmap of Creative Commons in the region following the 2008 iCommons Summit in Sapporo, Japan.

We hope you will join us!

Image: “CC Asia” by Lairaja, available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Philippines license.

Change.gov’s Choice Already Bearing Fruit

Fred Benenson, December 3rd, 2008

Less than 72 hours after the Obama-Biden Transition Team adopted our most permissive license for Change.gov, Cerado Ventana has built a Change.gov iPhone, mobile application, and widget. We will never know if this application would have been built if Change.gov hadn’t chosen such a permissive license, but it just goes to show what interesting things can happen when you let the world know your work is free to be built upon.

We originally caught this via Twitter and Christopher Carfi’s “Social Customer Manifesto” blog where he expressed thanks to Obama’s team for using CC:

Thank you again to the Obama administration for opening up Change.gov with Creative Commons to make this possible, and thanks to everyone here on the team. You have been building killer technology, and have enabled us to create this new conduit for citizens and government to connect.

This is just the beginning of innovative uses of the content from Change.gov, so keep an eye out for more interesting applications and let us know about them.

Check out the widget after the jump.
Read More…

Los Angeles: GOOD December featuring Creative Commons collaborations

Eric Steuer, December 3rd, 2008

If you’re in Los Angeles over the next two weeks, GOOD is hosting a series called GOOD December from Friday, 12/5 through Friday 12/19 in their new space on Melrose Avenue. It’s open to the public from 11am-5pm every day and will offer salons, panel discussions, meals, and more. There will be occasional parties in the evening hours that require an RSVP; check out the GOOD December site for more details. There’s also a nice write-up about it at Flavorpill with some useful info.

Creative Commons is collaborating with GOOD on two of the ongoing pieces of the series. One is an installation of Into Infinity - the art and music project we’re producing with Dublab. The other is a set of podcast interviews about the culture of sharing that I conducted with Jimmy Wales, Chris Hughes, Chris Dibona, Caterina Fake, Curt Smith, Joi Ito and a variety of other luminaries who use sharing as a cornerstone to work they do across a variety of fields. Snippets of the interviews will be running throughout the series’ two weeks - grab a set of headphones and listen up!