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

Google Images - Credit: google.com

Google Images now recognizes Creative Commons and let’s you filter your searches based on the suite of licenses as well as other licenses.

Let’s say you’re a blogger. You’ve just returned from a trip to New York City, and you’re writing a post on New York landmarks. You want to illustrate your travel guide with an image — as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. It’s easy to find images of New York online. But you want to make sure that you don’t use images without the permission of their owners, and you can’t afford licensing fees for professional photographers.

Today, we’re launching a feature on Image Search to help you find images that you can use for free, while respecting the wishes of artists and creators. This feature allows you to restrict your Image Search results to images that have been tagged with licenses like Creative Commons, making it easier to discover images from across the web that you can share, use and even modify. Your search will also include works that have been tagged with other licenses, like GNU Free Documentation license, or are in the public domain.

A little late.  I was expecting this about a year ago.

• Google Blog
• Creative Commons

Creative Commons NonCommercial Icon. Source: Creative Commons and Wikimedia Commons. License: CC-BY 3.0

Creative Commons is starting up a second survey on the NonCommercial provision of their licenses, this one aiming at non-authors.

During the first phase of the study, which took place last fall, we focused on talking with and surveying creators, using a questionnaire that was fielded to a sample of US-based content creators, and also made available (in an expanded version) to anyone interested. See 1, 2, 3.

Now we want to hear about noncommercial use from the user’s perspective — recognizing of course that the creator/user distinction is itself worthy of study! Whether you consider yourself a member of the Creative Commons community, or are interested more generally in copyright, we hope you will respond. While answering all the questions can take a while, particularly if you have a lot to say, many people who participated last time found it an interesting and useful experience.

Even though the provision is still not a free one, I hope this will clarify a few things about it. Note that the survey takes a while to complete, so set aside some time before starting.

• Creative Commons
• NonCommercial Survey

Licensing Sanity - Credit: Brianna Laugher (CC BY)

Wikipedia is voting to switch to CC BY-SA from the GFDL.

To qualify to vote, one must have made 25 edits to a Wikimedia site prior to March 15. Make sure you’re logged in to the project on which you qualify, and you should see a site notice at the top of each page that looks like the image below (red outline added around notice).

…

Click on “vote now” and you’ll be taken to the voting site.

For background on the migration process, see Wikimedia’s licensing update article and the following series of posts on the Creative Commons blog:

• On being a creative commoner
• Wikipedia and attribution
• Wikipedia licensing Q&A posted
• Wikipedia/CC news: FSF releases FDL 1.3
• Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses released
• DRAFT Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses
• Approved for Free Cultural Works
• Wikipedia and Creative Commons next steps
• Progress on license interoperability with Wikipedia

Do it.  CC BY-SA FTW.

• Creative Commons

Chemoluminescence - Credit: everyone's idle on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

The BBC plans to release R&DTV under CC BY-NC v2.

The BBC announced the move on Thursday through its Backstage Blog. For now, the experiment is extremely limited. A single program, called R&D TV, will be released for download to anyone, regardless of whether they’re located in the UK or not. So far, only one episode is done, and a second is in the works; more may be made if these prove to be reasonably popular.

Episode one can be downloaded from a BBC FTP server, where Flash, Quicktime, and Ogg versions are available, either as a five minute series of excerpts or in its full, half hour glory. The blog post suggests that Windows Media versions should be made available as well but, so far, these have not materialized. The files will also be made available through YouTube and Blip.TV.

As usual, while this is a step in the right direction, I need to mention that I really wish they were using a free license, like CC BY-SA.  I wish NC would just die.  Has anyone figured out what it means yet?  One thing that’s really weird is that they are using version 2.  What’s wrong with version 3?  Oh, also good job on offering Ogg.

• Ars Technica
• BBC Backstage

Creative Commons - Credit: creativecommons.org

CC0, the tool for waiving as many rights as possible, has reached 1.0.

Using CC0, you can waive all copyrights and related or neighboring rights that you have over your work, such as your moral rights (to the extent waivable), your publicity or privacy rights, rights you have protecting against unfair competition, and database rights and rights protecting the extraction, dissemination and reuse of data.

You can only do this if you are the owner of the rights to the work or you have authority from the person who owns those rights.

I kind of feel like this is just confusing. .  I guess it’s a good thing though.

• Creative Commons
• Plagiarism Today

Old Movie Camera - Credit: thomasclaveirole on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

YouTube is testing out allowing users to CC their videos, and offering a download option as well.

Many video creators on YouTube want their work to be seen far and wide. They don’t mind sharing their work, provided that they get the proper credit. Using Creative Commons licenses, we’re giving our partners and community more choices to make that happen. Creative Commons licenses permit people to reuse downloaded content under certain conditions.

We’re also testing an option that gives video owners the ability to permit downloading of their videos from YouTube. Partners could choose to offer their video downloads for free or for a small fee paid through Google Checkout. Partners can set prices and decide which license they want to attach to the downloaded video files (for more info on the types of licenses, take a look here).

I kind of feel like YouTube is always a year late on things.  Like seriously, how long did it take them to do high-def? Do they even have stereo sound yet?

• YouTube
• Creative Commons

CC Al Jazeera - Credit: Al Jazeera (CC BY)

Al Jazeera has launched a large, CC-BY repository of high quality media.

Al Jazeera is releasing 12 broadcast quality videos today shot in Gaza under Creative Commons’ least restrictive Attribution license. Each professionally recorded video has a detailed information page and is hosted on blip.tv allowing for easy downloads of the original files and integration into Miro. The value of this footage is best described by an International Herald Tribune/New York Times article describing the release:

In a conflict where the Western news media have been largely prevented from reporting from Gaza because of restrictions imposed by the Israeli military, Al Jazeera has had a distinct advantage. It was already there.

More importantly, the permissive CC-BY license means that the footage can be used by anyone including, rival broadcasters, documentary makers, and bloggers, so long as Al Jazeera is credited.

Wow…this is pretty big news.  I wonder which big US media organization will follow.

• Creative Commons
• International Herald Tribune
• Al Jazeera
• Joi Ito
• Freedom for IP

Creative Commons - Credit: creativecommons.org

The Creative Commons NonCommercial survey deadline has been extended to December 14.

Creative Commons is conducting a study on the meaning of “NonCommercial” and you can weigh in by answering a detailed questionnaire on the subject. We’ve extended the deadline for participation to December 14 (originally December 7) as we’re still getting healthy response via all those who blogged about the questionnaire this week.

Full disclosure: taking the questionnaire requires a significant investment of time — 15 to 25 minutes, and it isn’t an “easy” questionnaire — you’ll have to think. Unfortunately the meaning of “NonCommercial”, or at least people’s understanding of the term, is a nuanced issue (we’ll see what the results actually say about that, after analysis), requiring nuanced, even difficult questions to tease out the sub-issues. So a huge thanks to those who have participated, and thanks in advance to those who will. If you’re ready, go on and take the questionnaire.

As I said before, it’s a pretty in depth survey, but I think that the future of NonCommercial is really important to the future of free culture (see reasons to not use NC).

• Creative Commons

Georgi Parvanov - Credit: president.bg

Georgi Parvanov, the president of Bulgaria is now using CC BY-ND.

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.

The ND is unnecessary, but it’s a good thing that free licensing is going global.

• Creative Commons
• president.bg