Press Here - Credit: pressheretv.com

Mike Linksvayer (VP of CC) and John Lilly (CEO of Mozilla) make an appearance on NBCs press:here

Yesterday morning, “Press:Here” – a new technology news TV show produced by NBC in the San Francisco Bay Area – aired an interview with Creative Commons Vice President Mike Linksvayer. The episode serves as a nice primer to CC; in it, Mike gives some of our backstory and talks about how people and organizations are using CC’s copyright licenses to make sharing and collaboration easier. Mozilla CEO John Lilly is one of the episode’s other featured guests. Watch it online.

Wait, isn’t NBC in a league with MS?  How did this happen?

• Creative Commons

Open Video Conference. Source: http://openvideoconference.org screenshot. Public Domain.

Registration for the Open Video Conference has opened.

If you’ve already registered for the Open Video Conference, you can rest easy. But if you’ve been holding off, now is the time to sign up. The early bird rate expires May 5th, and the cost of registration will go up—so please register today to take advantage of the discount! Pricing is available on the registration page.

Registration entitles you to all conference benefits: talks and presentations, workshops, screenings, two lunches, and a cool afterparty featuring video turntablists Eclectic Method. Plus you’ll get to mingle with thought leaders in online video and take home a cool bag of schwag. Don’t wait—get registered ASAP!

The events and speakers for this are really interesting. I hope I can make it in June.

• Open Video Conference

We're Linux - Credit: Agustin Eguia

The Linux Foundation has announced the winners of the “We’re Linux” video competition.

Amitay Tweeto, a 25-year-old graphic designer from Israel, beat out 90 contest entrants to win the grand prize for his video “What Does It Mean To Be Free?” Tweeto will receive a trip to Tokyo, Japan to participate in the Linux Foundation’s Japanese Linux Symposium in October 2009.

The “We’re Linux” video contest was launched in December and encouraged Linux enthusiasts to create one-minute videos showcasing what Linux means to them, as well as to convince other people to try it. Ninety Linux users from around the world entered videos in the contest, which attracted a wide variety of submissions and drew more than 100,000 combined views of the entries.

In addition to the grand-prize winner, two runners-up are being recognized. The winning videos can be viewed on the Linux Foundation video site:

* Grand-prize winner: “What Does It Mean To Be Free?”

* Runner-up: “The Origin”

* Runner-up: “Linux Pub”

Even though they call it “Linux”, and not “GNU/Linux”, they seem to have the right emphasis on “free” instead of “open”.

• Linux  Foundation

Rip: Credit opensourcecinema

opensourcecinema.org, with the help of Kaltura, has released RiP: A Remix Manifesto under CC BY-NC-SA.

In RiP: A remix manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.

The film’s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy? Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil’s Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride.

A participatory media experiment, from day one, Brett shares his raw footage at opensourcecinema.org, for anyone to remix. This movie-as-mash-up method allows these remixes to become an integral part of the film. With RiP: A remix manifesto, Gaylor and Girl Talk sound an urgent alarm and draw the lines of battle.

Which side of the ideas war are you on?

Why can’t I figure out how to download this?  Is it seriously not downloadable?  How are people remixing it?  Does someone who wants to create an account want to tell me how?  Thanks, Kaltura people for emailing me about this, I didn’t post for a while because there was no downloadable version, and I wasn’t completely sure it really was released.  I’ve watched 2 chapters so far.  It’s pretty well done, but because the sides are called the copyRIGHT and the copyLEFT, I feel like we are saying that free licensing is a liberal standpoint and otherwise is conservative.  I really don’t think that’s the case, but maybe that’s just me.  I think it’s better that we don’t scare away conservatives by acting like this movement is some sort of hippy thing, when it’s really something that both sides can embrace (in my opinion, conservatives even more so, but that’s another rant).

Colbert Remixed - Credit: Comedy Central

Colbert/Lessig remixes were featured recently on the Colbert show, and Colbert made a video remix of one.

Colbert is mad

You’ll have to click the link for video.  We don’t post flash video on this blog.

• Lessig

Warzone 2100 - Credit: wz2100.net

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has posted a review of Warzone 2100.

I’ve played through a few levels, and fought a skirmish match against AI. It really does make you think: visually we’ve come a long way, but Warzone 2100 does so much that RTS games still struggle to get right today. There’s lots of gaps where excellent GUI design and player feedback fill in for modern games, but it’s still challenging, playable, and instantly comprehensible. More tantalising still are the recent blog updates on the Resurrection site, promising new terrain renderers and sky boxes of cloudy delight.

Pretty positive.

• Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Colbert - Credit: brokentrinkets on Flickr (CC BY)

Lawrence Lessig was on the Colbert Report last night.

Tonight, law professor (and Creative Commoner, Change Congresser, Remixer, and several other -ers as well) Lawrence Lessig guests on the show to talk about his recent book Remix. Rather ironically, he will be doing this on a channel owned by Viacom, the company currently suing YouTube for a billion dollars and not generally thought of as a corporate fan of remix culture.

Lessig lovers can set their DVRs for 11:30pm ET tonight; those not interested in paying absurdly high monthly fees for ad-filled TV channels (i.e., people like me) can watch the episode tomorrow on Hulu.

I haven’t actually watched it yet.  Someone let me know if it’s good.

• Ars Technica
• Creative Commons

Ghosts - Credit: ghosts.nin.com

Nine Inch Nail’s CC licensed Ghosts has been named the best-selling album of 2008 on Amazon.

First, there’s the critical acclaim and two Grammy nominations, which testify to the work’s strength as a musical piece. But what has got us really excited is how well the album has done with music fans. Aside from generating over $1.6 million in revenue for NIN in its first week, and hitting #1 on Billboard’s Electronic charts, Last.fm has the album ranked as the 4th-most-listened to album of the year, with over 5,222,525 scrobbles.

Even more exciting, however, is that Ghosts I-IV is ranked the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon’s MP3 store.

Take a moment and think about that.

Soon, a free album might acheive this as well.

• Creative Commons
• Amazon

Nine Inch Nails - Credit: uglynoid on Flickr (CC BY)

Nine Inch Nails’ “34 Ghosts IV”, which is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA, has been nominated for Best Rock Instrumental Performance.  In addition, Radiohead’s “House of Cards” has been nominated for several Grammys as well.

Congratulations to Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead for the nominations. Also, congratulations to all of the other artists whose work was nominated for Grammys this year, including Brian Eno, Diplo, Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo (AKA Gnarls Barkley), My Morning Jacket, Gilberto Gil, Peter Gabriel, Thievery Corporation, and Cornelius – all of whom have used Creative Commons licenses and/or have supported CC over the years.

Good deal.  I still have to make my mandatory comment about it not being CC BY-SA.

• Creative Commons

Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal has published an article by Lessig.  It is titled “In Defense of Piracy”.

How is it that sensible people, people no doubt educated at some of the best universities and law schools in the country, would come to think it a sane use of corporate resources to threaten the mother of a dancing 13-month-old? What is it that allows these lawyers and executives to take a case like this seriously, to believe there’s some important social or corporate reason to deploy the federal scheme of regulation called copyright to stop the spread of these images and music? “Let’s Go Crazy” indeed!

Note: Lessig did not choose to name the article “In Defense of Piracy”.  That was WSJ’s doing.

• WSJ
• Slashdot