Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Drip, a trip-hop group from the Philippines, will be releasing the first full-length Filipino CC licensed album, Identity Theft, this Saturday, 3/15, at 8PM at Magnet Café High Street, Bonifacio Global City, Tagui. Identity Theft will be released under a CC BY-NC-SA license and will released as an enhanced CD containing song stems as a means to to better facilitate remixers and DJs.

You can learn more about the release and Drip here.

Creative Commons licenses help creators (and users) opt for reasonable copyright by offering (and using) creative works under “some rights reserved” terms, expanding the commons where the default is “all rights reserved”.

We also offer tools to mark works that are in the public domain — and are working on a major upgrade of those tools — with a goal of making public domain works more available and more usable, effectively expanding the “no rights reserved” portion of the commons.

However, there’s nothing CC tools can do to protect against the stunting of the public domain through fiat, such as the retroactive extension of copyright terms. This is why many friends of CC are involved in efforts like Sound Copyright, a petition to the European Union to stop the retroactive extension of copyright in sound recordings from 50 years to 95 years.

Read about why retroactive copyright extension is bad policy — it offers miniscule incentive for the creation of new works while imposing large costs on the preservation and use of existing works. As a beneficial side effect, you’ll better understand the milieu from which Creative Commons arises and why the voluntary adoption of reasonable copyright through tools like ours are crucial to ensuring the existence of a viable commons — an open, participatory culture — for future generations.

Science Commons Counsel Thinh Nguyen has posted a response to a recently released statement by STM (the trade association for scientific, technology and medical publishers) on author addenda. This is an issue near and dear to our hearts, due to our Scholar’s Copyright work. Here’s an excerpt:

“[…] [STM] recently released a statement this March called “Statement on journal publishing agreements and copyright agreement ‘addenda.’” It dismisses concerns of scholars, scientists, and universities that publisher copyright agreements leave authors without sufficient rights to share or re-use their own articles as “rhetorical.” The statement suggested that “standard journal agreements” already allow authors to retain rights that various copyright addenda, like the ones offered by Science Commons, SPARC, MIT, and others, were designed to address. Thus, they seem to suggest, the addenda are superfluous at best.

However, despite their insistence that “most” journal publication agreements “typically” allow authors to retain some combination of rights, the reality is that there is no “standard” publication agreement.  […]

[…] Copyright addenda are needed because most authors don’t have a lawyer, much less a whole legal department or law firm (as most publishers have) to parse the legal language of publication agreements for them. They also don’t have the time to search through journal Web sites for hard-to-find policies and to stay up to date with journal policy changes. By attaching a standard addendum, scholars can ensure that they retain those rights that they expect to have without having to be a lawyer themselves. With more private and public funders mandating open access, scholars need now more than ever greater clarity and transparency.”

For more, see the original post over at Science Commons.

An update on Nine Inch Nails’ new CC-licensed album, Ghosts I-IV. Today, NIN’s Trent Reznor announced the launch of the Ghosts Film Festival project on YouTube. Reznor describes it as an “expansion of the Ghosts project into the visual world.”

The concept is for you to take whatever tracks you feel inspired by from Ghosts and create what you feel should accompany them visually. You will be able to see all of the submissions, and a team of us (including me) will be sorting through them and setting aside ones we feel are exceptional. Eventually (within a couple of months?) we will present a virtual “film festival” with me and some special guests presenting selections of your work.

Remember: an easy way to add Creative Commons license data to videos you upload to YouTube is in the “About This Video” field. Check out the page for Spoon’s “Don’t You Evah” for a good example.

The cool new video for Spoon’s “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb” was co-created by Ryan Junell – who you may know from his work on CC’s popular “Get Creative,” “Reticulum Rex,” and “Wanna Work Together?” clips, as well as for designing the Creative Commons logo. Check out some CC-licensed behind-the-scenes stills from the production on Ryan’s Flickr account.

Image via Flickr user telethon, available under CC BY-SA.

Freesound is a repository of CC-licensed audio samples … nearly 50,000 sounds.

In December Freesound received a Google Research Award which they’re using to create “Freesound 2.0″.

You can follow progress on their development blog and discuss on their forum.

I interviewed Freesound founder Bram de Jong a couple years ago.

rstevens (the r is for Richard), creator of popular webcomic Diesel Sweeties, announced on his blog that starting today he will be releasing the entire Diesel Sweeties archive for free under a CC BY-NC license. The archive contains close to 2,000 web comics, offering massive potential for to interesting reuses (via Boing Boing):

By my calculations, DS is going to hit 2000 comics in a little under two months. April is Clango’s 8th birthday. I’d like to celebrate by releasing the entire webcomic archive for free in ten volumes. It worked for Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead- not bad company to try and keep!

These files will be in PDF form, available one per week for ten weeks. You can donate if so inclined, or take advantage of ten classic shirt designs @$10.99. At the end of ten weeks, I plan to release a special anniversary art book.

All eBooks will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial license. You’re free to reformat them into .CBR, Word docs, XML, whatever you like. You’re also free to archive and share them with others for free. They’re even small enough to email. Just don’t use them commercially.

The second COMMUNIA workshop, Ethical Public Domain: Debate of Questionable Practices, will take place on Monday, March 31 in the geographic center of Europe: Vilnius, Lithuania.

The workshop will host ten rounds of debates on issues concerning to the public domain and related policies and practices, followed by a press conference inviting the media and public to join the discussion.

The workshop in Lithuania is organized by Minciu Sodas, an online laboratory experimenting with humanitarian efforts such as Pyramid of Peace, an innovative project helping Kenyans during political unrest by enabling the donation of mobile phone airtime, which can be shared or traded in the Kenyan mobile phone network for food and medicine.

Also, the First COMMUNIA International Conference will be held in Leuven-La-Neuve (Belgium) from June 30 - July 1, 2008. There is currently a Call for papers for the conference. The deadline for submissions is March 30th, and abstracts addressing one of the following topics are very welcome: Libraries and archives, Public sector Information, Creative works, Scientific research, Publishing intermediaries or Emerging Issues.

COMMUNIA is a project funded by the European Commission and coordinated by Politecnico di Torino. It consists of over 35 members from 21 countries dedicated to developing “the single European point of reference for high-level policy discussion and strategic action on all issues related to the public domain in the digital environment” and related topics, including Creative Commons licensing.

In January the first COMMUNIA workshop was held in Turin, Italy, whose highlights included, among many, a discussion of the latest developments in CC metadata.

On May 28-30, The Center for Intellectual Property at the University of Maryland University College will be hosting a symposium focused on U.S. copyright monopoly, technological innovation and higher education institutions titled “Monopoly: Playing the Innovation Game”. The symposium will take place at the UMUC Inn and Conference Center in metro Washington D.C.

Tied into the lengthly and impressive speaker list is a competition encouraging legal reuse of public domain and CC-licensed works with a nice prize pot in which you can choose free admission to two (2) Fall 2008 or Spring 2009 workshops of your choice, a $200 cash prize, or a secret prize (TBA). Entries must be CC-licensed and in by May 1, 2008. From CIP:

Pull clips, text, and images from the CIP’s website or from the public domain and use them to create a new work of art in any medium. You can add your own content or mix it up with some Creative Commons (CC) licensed art. All submissions should be CC-Licensed.

We encourage you to make use of at least one item created by the CIP. In the end, your message should tie in with the 2008 Symposium theme: (c) Monopoly: Playing the innovation game. Whoever gives us the most creative and coherent content remix will be awarded a prize valued at up to $300.

CEO of Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig along with VP of Science Commons, John Wilbanks, and myself, Jon Phillips holder of the title of the “human inbox” of Creative Commons [1] will all be participating at the 1st International Creative Commons Korea conference, “Open Culture in CC” on Friday, March 14 in Seoul, Korea. Lessig will go big with his keynote, Wilbanks will be presenting “Information Sharing: A Universal Solvent for Life Sciences” and I will round up the CC pack with my new presentation: Share or Die: Collaborative Media Projects from Art to Business. Yes, that’s right! I will be wearing more of my art hat at this one, but will round it up by discussing how individual practice must be sustainable all the way up the ladder to a large scale web company.

These presentations are the tip of the iceberg as brilliant Korean colleagues will cover many topics as they relate to Korean society in the large global context and Chiaki Hayashi from Loftwork in Japan will discuss running a business where Creative Commons licensing is core to its daily function.

I’m quite eager though to interact with our Korean colleagues on the recently announced Creative Commons licensing integration into Naver. And, I should note that by looking at the web traffic at http://creativecommons.org, there is a massive surge from Korea since the Naver announcement. The CC Korea blog states:

On 26 February, Naver, one of the major portal service providers in Korea, announced that it officially introduces Creative Commons License to its blog and café services and began a grand campaign for promoting CCL with cartoons, videos, etc. As for the largest portal service provider in user size at home, Naver has been struggling with copyright infringements, content and blog posting piracy activities of users. In a hope to find a reliable solution against them, Naver has chosen to introduce the CC license scheme. And it is very welcomed.

Relatively belated, but thanks to their introduction, most of the Korean portal sites take part in CC licensing. With this announcement, Naver becomes the third next to Daum , which has already adopted CCL to its blog service in 2005, and Paran in 2007. These portal sites are known to grab more than 90% of Korea’s portal market.

The key thing to note with Naver’s CC licensing integration and as a service that effectively everyone with a net connection uses, is that Koreans now have CC licensing front-and-center. Many know that Korea takes the crown as the most wired nation with 95% broadband penetration inside the home [2]. Korea, is a hyper-connected homogenous society that now has CC licensing on the most used service in the country. How long will it take for Korea to take the title of the country with the highest level of Creative Commons license adoption per individual?

UPDATE: Michelle already wrote a stellar blog post about the conference btw.

[1] Ok, ok, my long form title is Community and Business Development Manager.
[2] Trust me. From living in Korea, I’ve seen four year olds with cellphones on the Internet! What? And, now that I’m living 50% of my time in Guangzhou, China (the other 50 ‘cent in San Francisco), I’m feeling the burn without that 100 megabit in the home. Try 1 megabit for me…if I’m lucky!

Creative Commons is pleased to announce the release of LiveContent 2.0, a LiveDVD of Creative Commons-licensed multimedia content and free and open source software. LiveContent allows users to explore open content such as music, video, photography, books, and educational materials that can be freely used, copied, and built upon. From the press release:

The LiveContent project draws CC-licensed multimedia content from a variety of diverse projects aiming to share creativity and culture more openly. Included are photographs from Flickr.com and Wikimedia Commons, music from Jamendo.com and Simuze.nl, videos from Make Magazine, Boing Boing TV and others, books from Manybooks.net, and open educational resources from MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative.

LiveContent 2.0 builds upon the previous release by demonstrating a unique content “autocuration” process with Flickr.com, and calls for the further development of technologies that make it easier to spread and reuse CC-licensed content.

LiveContent is a product of collaboration across a number of organizations including Red Hat, Worldlabel.com and various CC content providers. LiveContent 2.0 is now available for free download at the Fedora Project Spins Tracker, and a pre-burned disc may be purchased at On-Disk.com.

Learn more about the LiveContent project and read the full press release.

This came through our RSS readers this week via Boing Boing and is really quite amazing, showing the power CC licenses can have in advancing positive results outside of culture and technology (the findings are released online, along with detailed instructions, under a CC BY license):

Australian scientists have developed a blood test for African sleeping sickness that does not require the fancy equipment found in upscale medical labs. Even better, they made the details of their work available for free by publishing a paper in the Feb. 6 issue of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, which operates under a Creative Commons license.

Zablon Njiru and Andrew Thompson of Murdoch University led a team that developed the elegantly simple way to check for trypanosomes — protozoan parasites that are sometimes carried by tsetse flies.

To catch an infection in the earliest stages, when it is most treatable, technicians must look for a very small number of parasites in a sea of body fluids. That is not an easy thing to do, but there is a trick to make it easier: By mixing the liquid sample with a cocktail of molecules that can copy trypanosome DNA, they can make the serum resistance associated gene, a signpost of the disease, stand out — transforming each test into a manageable task.

Instead of using the polymerase chain reaction, which amplifies the microbe DNA with the aid of an expensive instrument called a thermocycler, the researchers employed another gene multiplying technique called loop-mediated isothermal amplification. It requires little more than a warm water bath and a few chemicals. After that procedure, which takes less than a half hour, the scientists can simply add some SYBR green dye and watch the brew change color if it contains a boatload of duplicated genetic material from the pathogen.

In case you missed it, we have extended our deadline for 2008 Summer Intern Applications to March 21, meaning that you have two more weeks to get all the necessary materials submitted! The CC internships are a great opportunity to engage with the CC-community as a whole and actively experience the amazing opportunities the bay area has to offer. There are four different intern positions available - Community Development, Business Development, Technology, and Development/Fundraising - presenting a variety of avenues for potential interns to explore.

As a former intern, I feel comfortable saying that while these positions are not for the faint of heart (”full time means full time!”, “why isn’t this wiki formating working?”) they are incredibly rewarding in terms of a give/get ratio. You have the opportunity to work on some amazing projects with some equally (if not more) amazing people and ultimately walk away with a ton of real experience under your belt. Anyone who is interested in the issues that face the CC-community and is looking for a valuable way to spend their summer should apply for one of these positions without hesitation.

Thanks to Alessandro for alerting us to kunstderfuge, the largest resource of classical music in MIDI format online. kunstderfuge is a subsidiary of OnClassical, the CC-friendly Italian net-label we featured earlier here.

At kunstderfuge, there are complete piano works by Beethoven, Chopin, Haydn, Mozart, Bach, original piano rolls (including sacred hymns, medieval and renaissance music, and ragtimes), and much more, all available in MIDI format. The files have been produced by a variety of contributors and are ordered by composer, making them easily searchable.

Since 2004, many of these MIDI recordings have been released under a CC license. Just recently, kunstderfuge chose to release a plethora of new MIDI sequences under a CC BY-NC-SA license, meaning there are now a total of 2,192 MIDI files (13.3% of the entire collection) published under a license that allows you to use the files for any purpose outside of commercial intent. Very cool!

The first beta of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 launched yesterday. Doubtless hundreds if not thousands of reviews of just this beta will be posted on the web, many critiquing or celebrating the browser’s implementation of various web standards.

However, one interesting item concerns specifications for standards developed alongside IE8:

For the OpenService Format and WebSlice Format specs, we’re using two separate Creative Commons vehicles to allow developers to freely use and build on our work.  We’re licensing our copyright in the OpenService Format Specification under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. This license lets others copy, distribute, modify and build upon the specification, even for commercial uses, as long as they simply give credit to Microsoft and license their own changes under the same terms.  This license is also consistent with the license adopted by the OpenSearch community, whose work relates to the OpenService Format spec.

We’re setting a new precedent with the WebSlice Format Specification by dedicating our copyright in it to the public domain using the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication, the first time we’ve used a public domain dedication in connection with one of our specs.  This allows anyone to freely copy, distribute, modify and build upon the specification for any purpose, without any additional conditions or obligations whatsoever. In this case, our public domain dedication is in keeping with the expectations of the hAtom Microformats community.

It’s cool that Microsoft not only released the specifications under liberal terms, but followed the lead of the relevant communities, ensuring that there are no copyright barriers to collaboration with those communities.

Total Recut is an online social networking community for fans and creators of video remixes, recuts, and mash-ups that facilitates online collaboration between video artists. CC licensing is built in to their UI, allowing users to remix one another with relative ease, which in addition to their ‘materials section’ (comprised of CC licensed and Public Domain works) makes for a large body of content to pool from. From TotalRecut:

Total Recut is a social networking, video sharing and resources website for fans and creators of video remixes, recuts and mash-ups, where users can upload, view, share, rate and comment on user generated remixed video clips. Total Recut was created in June 2007 as a result of the Masters Degree project of an Irish graduate student, Owen Gallagher, who wrote his Masters Thesis on remix culture. The Donegal, Ireland based service uses embedding technology to display a wide array of video content, including movie trailer recuts, political remixes, machinima, subvertisements, music mash-ups and many others. The site also contains original material that users can remix including a large number of public domain videos and Creative Commons licensed clips.

Unregistered users of Total Recut are able to watch videos on the site, while registered users may submit an unlimited number of videos and make wiki style changes to any information relating to the content. The site offers social networking opportunities in the ability to add friends, comment on each others profiles, start personal video collections and send messages, as well as an active forum and blog, which users can contribute to freely. Users can also enter contests to win prizes, find tutorials and tools to help them create their own remixes, learn about the issues surrounding remix culture, including the balance between copyright and freedom of expression, download mobile content to their cellphones and connect with other like-minded individuals.

ccLearn is a participating member of the program committee for the upcoming conference on COMPUTERS, FREEDOM, AND PRIVACY: TECHNOLOGY POLICY ‘08, to be held May 20-23, 2008 in New Haven, CT.

The conference covers many different themes, including a few near and dear to the heart of Creative Commons, such as social networks, digital education, copyright and fair-use, open access, and more. We encourage you to consider submitting a proposal and attending the conference! But act fast, deadline for most proposal submissions is in less than two weeks.

Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears is the new online science magazine for K-5th grades focusing on polar issues wrought by global climate change. Developed by a host of contributors, including the Ohio State University with funding from the National Science Foundation (Research on Learning in Formal and Informal settings), the magazine will get much of its content from existing material in the National Science Digital Library. According to this article on NSDL’s website, the magazine will contain a multitude of resources, including online activities, images, text, and multimedia (podcasts, videos, “even a browseable Virtual Bookshelf” with children’s literature for classroom use).

The first issue is titled “A Sense of Place” and it’s already up for you to browse. In addition to the resources mentioned above, this issue offers quirky animations, links to web sites, printable and foldable book versions of its articles, and to top it off—a poetry lesson plan featuring work from students in Anchorage, Alaska.

Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears will be a valuable contribution to science education for Elementary students, something that has been lacking in the past. It will cover content across five departments: In the Field: Scientists at Work, Professional Learning, Science and Literacy, Across the Curriculum, and Polar News and Notes. The magazine is headed by a great team of contributors from various organizations, signifying change towards openness in the climate of education (perhaps a positive to counteract the negative in global climate change?). All content is offered under a Creative Commons License—CC BY-SA.

Indaba Music, in their words, is “an international community of musicians, music professionals, and fans exploring the creative possibilities of making music with people in different places”. Enabling exciting forms of online musical creation, Indaba allows musicians to work with each other in ways that are both fresh and exciting, facilitating new and interesting means of collaboration. Unsurprisingly, Indaba is getting serious praise from the press and we thankfully got to chat with co-founders Matthew Siegel and Daniel Zaccagnino about what they are doing at Indaba and how it functions within the context of the CC-community (CC licensing options are built into their UI). Check out their responses below to find out more:

(Indaba logo (c) Indaba Media, LLC, All Rights Reserved)

What’s Indaba Music all about? What’s its backstory? How did it come about? Who’s involved?

Indaba Music is an international community of musicians, from amateurs to Grammy-award winners, all mingling and making music together online. We came up with the idea for Indaba after starting a non-profit label in college as a means to provide new opportunities for student artists and give them greater exposure. That experience led us to bigger ideas - the two most exciting of which were 1) the way the connectivity of the internet has given artists increased access to fans (and vice versa) and to each other, and 2) the spread of cheap digital production technology (in the form of inexpensive but high quality software and hardware). To us, this meant that there were more people creating music than at any other point in history, and there was an exciting opportunity to connect these music-makers with each other and offer them new possibilities for collaboration and discovery. That’s ultimately what Indaba is - a place where artists meet and create new music.
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This hit the net last week, but it took a little while for us to go through our various channels to figure out what was going on (i.e. if only I had taken German in high school). CC-evangelist Cory Doctorow was recently interviewed on the German show Metropolis (a product of the German-French network Arte) in which they chat about his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (or Backup, as it is titled Germany) as well as “online freedom and surveillance, and science fiction”. The whole thing is CC licensed, so it is available for reuse if you so desire.

UPDATE: Cory’s second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, has been published in German by Heyne (under the title Upload) with the text released under a CC BY-NC-SA license. Cory also recently did an interview about CC licensing and science fiction with the German net-show WatchBerlin.