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After many hours with lawyers, and many productive hours with tech-types, and lots of imagination by many, an idea first suggested by Hal Abelson and Eric Eldred will come to life on Monday, December 16: Creative Commons. Come see (though RSVP because we're filling fast) and celebrate. 'Tis the season to be giving, and this will be a great gift to the Commons.
So just back to Japan after a quick trip to San Francisco to help many many extraordinary people launch Creative Commons. The event was fantastic, especially the Flash that explains our Licensing Project. Watch the flash, and check out the site. We are eager for feedback, and for ideas about where to go next.
I can't begin to describe how grateful I am to everyone who made this happen. I am especially grateful to creators who have run with the licenses right away—heroes such as Cory Doctorow (who will be releasing under a CC license the entire text of his amazing book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom as a free, freely redistributable e-book on January 9th. But buy the book as a present. It is the best novel I've read in years), and Peter Wayner (who has licensed his Free for All under a CC license), and Tim O'Reilly (the first adopter of the "Founders' Copyright").
It is no accident that those who understand this are those closest to technology. Our challenge will be to find ways to explain it so other creators get it as well. If you have ideas, or ideas for new projects, please let us know. Our single, overarching aim: build the public domain, by building projects that expand the range of creative work available for others to build upon.
Meanwhile, thanks to everyone who helped make this happen. And check on this channel for more news as the project develops.
Matt Croydon wonders about how CC licenses will interact with software. In a careless earlier version of this, I said they won't. Sam Ruby suggests the most I could mean by that is that our energy will be directed elsewhere. Indeed, that's the most I mean. We share RMS's concern that there is a proliferation of licenses in software. And our view was that there was a dearth for other creative content. Thus we start outside the software world. But creative reuse of creative content is what CC is all about. My apologies for any confusion.
I missed a string of comments about CC licenses and software. Shelley raises some great questions. Here's the problem. We're trying to develop tools to enable people to express their preferences as simply as possible. We can't do much to make the underlying law simple.
I've tried to answer some of the questions in the extended entry. But I'm afraid Shelley will be right again: The answers will only raise more questions. There's lots here to work out, and we can't do all the working out.
There's a wonderfully careful analysis of various CC issues at burningbird. Thank you. One point to clarify, however. CC licenses are, at this moment, at least, permanent, in the sense that the term is as long as copyright runs (and we'll see whether that's permanent or not soon enough). That issue was a tough one for us (I, of course, favor "limited terms"), and we're eager for feedback on that issue.
But just because you can't revoke a particular license doesn't mean you can't revoke the offer. If, for example, you offer content under a CC license for a month, and then change your mind, you can stop offering the content under that license. Anyone who accepted your offer while it was valid, of course, has a deal. But no one after you withdraw the offer can accept anymore.
Finally, my blog is licensed in the xml. Button coming soon.
So Peter Wayner reports that after he put his book, Free for All, under a Creative Commons license, the price for used books at Amazon has gone up by 40%. RIAA (or better, artists the RIAA is supposed to represent): Take note.
Matt Haughey is one of the creators who helped make Creative Commons happen. He's built an amazingly cool site called ticketstubs that enables people to share stories around events.
Bruce Perens has extraordinarily great news about a deal he's struck with Prentice Hall to permit "open source" publication of a series of books. It was no surprise that Tim O'Reilly got the value of adding work to the commons (as O'Reilly press has with a bunch of titles donated to the public domain and a bunch of content to be licensed under a CC license: read here). But it is a real testament to Bruce's skill that he convinced Prentice Hall. Congratulations. I only hope we can help make the licenses part of the semantic web.
Cory Doctorow's brilliant novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, is out today. Buy it early and often. Cory's book is also the very first to be offered initially both for sale and under a CreativeCommons license. That means you can also download it for free. As Cory describes it,
"The entire text of my novel is available as a free download in a variety of standards-defined formats. No crappy DRM, no teasers, just the whole damned book."
But as he (and I) expect, once you start the book, you'll see you want it in its bound form. So again, you might as well buy it too.
Cory has been defending the rights of creators at EFF for sometime now. With this experiment, he is putting his money where his heart is. I've had enormous respect for him for a very long time, but I'm quickly discovering new heights of respect.
Congratulations, Cory, on a great novel, made available to the world freely — and with great CC metadata to boot!
Check out the CC Weblog later today for an interview with Cory about the novel, and his ideas about licensing.
As most no doubt know, Dave has brought weblogs to Harvard's Berkman Center, which is extraordinarily great news. Today the Harvard weblog adopted the Creative Commons technology for expressing just how free their weblog content is. More great news. Martin Schwimmer, trademark and ICANN maven, is struggling with the same issues—though he chose words to say what the CC license says with code. And now, I learn, he will use CC licenses as well.
Alas, weaning the lawyers from their words proves harder than the programmers. Maybe the generation of lawyers that Dave influences will be different.
You build the hard stuff, and we'll build the middle ground ("Some Rights Reserved)"). As you know, we've been planning our Conservancy Project for sometime, and are eager to find the right code/protocol/content to fuel its launch.
There's a great example of how Creative Commons works on its blog. A clip: "About a month after submitting a few acoustic guitar tracks to Opsound's sound pool [and thus releasing the song under an Attribution-ShareAlike license], I got an email from a violinist named Cora Beth, who had added a violin track to one of the guitar tracks..."
This is getting very cool.
So one of the million things I've not had time to do while finishing this draft (answering a b'gillion emails is another) was to listen to this. As I described before, Colin Mutchler posted a guitar track to Opsound. Opsound makes its content available to others under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike license. Cora Beth, a 17 year old violinist, took the track and added a violin track. The result is this.
As Brian Flemming commented on the post, "a great way to illustrate the value of CC to someone who perhaps doesn’t quite get it." Indeed it is. Listen to this, and you'll can't help but get it.
This is a great story about the creativity possible when control is relaxed. Whenever I read these stories, I have an odd dejavu to the days of Gorbachev: The Soviet Union would relax its controls, and people would write stories about how freedom actually increased innovation and creativity. The Soviet officials were amazed and surprised. But what's amazing to me is that we're surprised when we learn the same thing here.
UPDATE: I was whining about something re the Times that Dave Winer has solved. I apologize.
The Pet Rock Stars have completed two songs from the blogathon. As previously reported, the work in progress, and the final songs were posted under a Creative Commons license. Within a day, their creativity has sparked other creativity. Erik Ostrom has posted a cover of Southdown, one of the two songs the Pet Rock Stars wrote. Here are the two songs Shannon Campbell and Scott Andrew wrote: Southdown and Nothing New. Here's Scott's take on all this re-creativity. And here is the song Erik Ostrom made: Stork Carpets.
Creative Commons has announced a contest to help us spread the message better. The idea is to build a 2-minute moving image that says what Get Creative says better. Cool prizes, amazing judges, lots of new creative content.
There is a great deal of very exciting stuff that has already happened at Creative Commons, and that is about to happen too. We've got some exciting announcements coming soon, and the take-up rate on the licenses has surpassed our wildest hopes.
But there are the moments of disappointment. And this exchange with "legal" at mp3.com is one of the most disappointing.
The story begins when our assistant director, Neeru, sent an email to mp3.com to try to open up a line of communication about Creative Commons and its mission. As she wrote,
>> Hello MP3.com,
>>
>> Creative Commons provides free copyright licenses to musicians who want
>> to distribute their content online, but wish to reserve some copyright
>> protection. In fact, one you your artists, the Phoenix Trap, has
>> incorporated a Creative Commons license into their MP3.com home page.
>> We would love to help you offer Creative Commons license to your users
>> -- it's free, and a great way to make clear the rights and
>> restrictions artists would like to offer their fans.
>>
>> http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/15/the_phoenix_trap.html
>>
>> Please feel free to contact me.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Neeru
>>
Harmless enough, I thought, and it was encouraging to see mp3.com artists begin to use CC licenses.
Monday, "legal" responded as follows:
>> From: legal@mp3.com
>> Date: Mon Aug 4, 2003 11:05:33 AM US/Pacific
>> To: neeru@creativecommons.org
>> Subject: RE:Creative Commons and MP3 [#1316347]
>>
>>
>> Nothing replaces the legal protections provided by registering a
>> copyright with the US Copyright Office--most certainly not your "free
>> license."
>>
>> This email is formal notice for you to cease and desist from further
>> contacting our artists through our web site to solicit for your
>> product/services, which are not sanctioned by us.
>>
>> Legal Department
>> Music & Media
>> Vivendi Universal Net USA, Inc.
>>
I can't describe how depressing this sort of stuff is. There are many in the content community who understood right away the benefits and virtues of Creative Commons licenses. Indeed, at our announcement in December, we had a video endorsement from not only John Perry Barlow but also Jack Valenti.
But we've obviously not yet made the mission clear enough -- at least if this is the sort of response we get from a company like mp3.com. Mp3.com was, in its birth at least, one of the most innovative digital music companies out there. Artists were free to sign with mp3.com without promising exclusivity. The company did a great deal to enable a wide and diverse base of creators, who could produce new music and sell it on the site. Tied with the fantastic eMusic.com site (which enables unlimited downloads of real mp3s for a flat monthly fee), the potential for this group of companies to help build a revolution in the creation and distribution of content is unlimited.
Except, perhaps, by old debates and even older thinking. So when "legal" writes:
>> Nothing replaces the legal protections provided by registering a
>> copyright with the US Copyright Office--most certainly not your "free
>> license."
I want say: Of course, and nothing in CC's mission would limit or discourage an artist from registering copyrights with the US Copyright office. Indeed, we are working on systems to make that registration much easier.
And of course, our "free license" is not meant to replace a copyright registration or copyright protection for that matter. Indeed, without copyright protection, our licenses are useless.
But I don't get just why artists would not benefit from a "free license," "legal" at mp3.com? Artists in general don't make a great deal of money. You'd think eliminating the cost of lawyers would be a great help to them, wouldn't you? Indeed, if you count the number of "free licenses" that we've given away, and you calculate their value the way the RIAA calculates the cost of music piracy, Creative Commons has given more than $100 billion to the creative community. That can't hurt artists, can it?
>>
>> This email is formal notice for you to cease and desist from further
>> contacting our artists through our web site to solicit for your
>> product/services, which are not sanctioned by us.
[Sigh] again. Again, the greatest thing about mp3.com was that the artists were not owned by mp3.com, or anyone else. They were free. Yet here we are being ordered not to contact "our artists" "through our web site." I'm not sure just what that would mean, but the tone is very sad. Mp3.com artists are among the most creative artistically and commercially. Shouldn't they be free to decide how best to sell their songs? Wasn't that what mp3.com was all about?
>>
>> Legal Department
>> Music & Media
>> Vivendi Universal Net USA, Inc.
Maybe the signature captures it all. The promise of something different at mp3.com -- despite great technology and really innovative business ideas -- must always compete with "legal." Innovation must compete with tradition.
Is it impossible to imagine the lawyers ever on the side of innovation?
The bottom line is this: We've done lots of work at Creative Commons to change how people think about these issues. I think we've done great work. But we've obviously not done enough to crack through, even in places like mp3.com. So help us. Enter our contest. Blog better ideas. And tell me how we might get the lawyers to see. A year ago, I was quite confident I knew how. It has been a year of shaking that confidence.
There's a nice piece in the Wall Street Journal's E-Commerce Special "E-Commerce" Report about Creative Commons. The report describes three futures for copyright, with CC among the three. (The WSJ charges $350 for the privilege of linking to a web version of an article about your company, so rather than link, I'll just describe the article (Does this really making you better off, WSJ?)).
The coolest part of the story is the first announcement of Creative Commons' Sampling Licenses which will be launched in Brazil by Brazil's culture minister, and cult figure, Gilberto Gil this December.
The Sampling Licenses say "sample my work if you want, even for commercial purposes, just don't copy and sell my work without my permission." It's aim is to make explicit what whole genres of music presume -- at least until you become famous. The idea was brought to us by Negativland and People Like Us.
Stay tuned for more about the release.
So GNOME Desktop News has a great story about a project to build a comprehensive package of world flags in SVG format. The flags are then donated under a Creative Commons Public Domain license. The call for these flags went up Saturday. So far, there are 130 flags contributed. To see the flags so far, look here. Very cool.
MoveOn.org has announced a "political advertising contest" for the best ad that "tell[s] the truth" about President Bush. I take it that "the truth" could be for or against the president, but all submissions must be CC.
Mark Cooper, of the Consumer Federation of America has published a new book, Media Ownership and Democracy in the Digital Information Age. The book can be purchased at Amazon (link to come), or it can be downloaded for free under a Creative Commons license.
Today, the Berklee College of Music has released Berklee Shares, a site offering free music lessons for download. All content is available under a Creative Commons license, including mp3s embedded with CC licenses.
Free lessons for musicians, and a valuable lesson for the rest of us.
Bravo.
I wrote at the end of last month about Mark Cooper's new book, Media Ownership and Democracy in the Digital Information Age, which is available for free download under a Creative Commons license. It's also available from Amazon. Mark was slow to get me the link because he said he didn't want to "compete with free." But free complements nonfree, and if you like what you read, buy it from Amazon.
In an effort to grow the technology around the Semantic Web, Creative Commons launched a series of Technology Challenges. Nathan Yergler has posted a very cool answer to one of those challenges. MozCC is "an extension for Mozilla-based browsers, including Mozilla Firebird, Mozilla and Netscape, which scans pages for RDF, specifically embedded Creative Commons licenses. When a license is detected, mozCC does two things. First, it scans for license information pertaining to the current web page and places relevant icons on the status bar. Second, it enables a button on the toolbar which allows you to explore the parsed licensing metadata." Nathan has also developed a Creative Commons RDF License Validator.
I've written before about SecondLife's decision (1) to assert what is denied in There -- that creators own the stuff they create, and (2) to experiment with CreativeCommons technology to enable them simply to signal the freedoms they grant with their stuff.
I think this is a great and important move -- as (1) I believe in the rights of authors, and hate the vWorlds being created where those rights are taken away, but (2) I believe the existing copyright system has become so insanely complex that it requires (3) a second best solution like the GNU GPL, or Creative Commons.
Reports are that my hero Yochai Benkler criticized SecondLife for this decision -- though the reports are about a question he raised at a conference, and I've not yet seen anything he's written about this. James has a great and balanced piece on LawMeme.
Maybe it's time for Yochai to get a blog to explain his views a bit more?
Creative Commons is having its anniversary party on Sunday, December 14, from 6-9pm at 111 Minna Gallery, 111 Minna Street, San Francisco (directions). There will be some cool new CC tunes, and great-news annoucements, and most of Joi's cool SF friends. Be sure to RSVP.
It was a great party last night. Thanks to Glenn especially, but everyone from Creative Commons. We've released a new flash which is not yet on the CC site, but it is here (warning -- 7 mg large. We'll be producing and posting a lower sound quality version soon.)
Jason Schultz has a great post about the economics of Creative Commons' new "sampling license." Our new Flash describes it in digimedia speak. But the essence of the idea is that artists can signal to others that they are free to "sample" the artist's work, even sample for commercial purposes, without entering the blackhole of lawyer land to clear permissions upfront. This is a derivatives only license, which, after our trip to Japan, we see we need to version a bit more to make sure it fits the full range of "derivatives only" creativity.
There's alot of detail and there's more we'll be announcing soon about this, but Jason's point is a great one: The great benefit of this simple signal is to build a strain of content that others can build upon freely, and thereby to encourage the reuse and demand for that free content. That was exactly the intuition that Negativland, Vicki Bennett, and Gilberto Gil got us to see.
Cory Doctorow's second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, has been released. The draft I saw was brilliant, and it was only a draft! The book is for sale in bookstores and online. And it is also available as a free download, under a Creative Commons license.
So Apple released this amazing new part of iLife, GarageBand. With it, you can make great music. (Well, I don't know about you, but I know Willem will make great music with it.) Anyway, one missing piece has been a simple way to know what content you're free to mix and remix within your GarageBand app. MacBand has now solved that problem. They've got a great archive of music by genre -- all marked with Creative Commons licenses.
Cory Doctorow has relicensed his book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Last year he released it under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs -- license. In so doing, he proved conventional wisdom about "free distribution" wrong -- the book did exceptionally well. Now, without even waiting for the rest of the publishing world to catch up, he's taken the next great leap: the book is now available under one of the least restrictive licenses -- Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. Already, cool versions are emerging. Here's a Speed Reading tool for both new books by Trevor Smith.
I hate to point and run, but there's not more than that that I can do Mondays-Wednesdays and I promise to come back to this BUT: there is a great debate about the value of Creative Commons summarized at Ping's page.
Bizarrely, the law of copyright has made it extraordinarily difficult for a copyright owner voluntarily to give up control. For most of the history of copyright law in the US, there were a million ways to forfeit your copyright. Today, it's not even clear that it is possible.
This creates a problem for some. Ron Suskind, for example, wanted to make sure that the records supporting his book, The Price of Loyalty, were in the public domain so others could draw upon them to verify, or critique, his account of Paul O'Neill's time at Treasury. In principle, the documents should be in the public domain because they were government documents. But there would always be a way for someone to argue that, e.g., the digitization created a separate right, or special marks on the document created a special right, or whatever -- all rendering uncertain what Suskind wanted certain -- namely, that no legal control would be exercised over the use of these digitized documents at all.
Suskind used a Creative Commons' Public Domain mark, which we have modified now to signal either that an author is dedicating work to the public domain or that the author has taken steps to certify that a work is in the public domain (and in so doing, dedicating whatever rights the certifier might be said to have over the work.)
A related struggle seems to be working its way clear in the RSS space. A while ago, Dave Winer released the spec for RSS 2.0 under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. His stated purpose was to assure anyone that he was waiving any control he might have in the spec, and translating any control he might have into a copyleft requirement.
As with Suskind, one might have asked, well, what copyright related control did you have anyway? But that, it seems to me, misses the point: In an area of insane uncertainty, both moves establish clarity. And while the legal control over a spec or even a protocol is just one tiny part of the overall question of how a protocol develops, and whether it is adopted, it does remove an unnecessary question.
The winners of the Creative Commons contest have been announced. I would have had a particularly hard time picking between the first two. "Mix Tape" is a brilliant way of making the point.
As mentioned elsewhere, I participated in a forum at Glocom Tokyo Friday, celebrating the launch of Creative Commons Japan. I gave a talk (not terribly interesting -- I've heard it all before), but then attendees at the forum discussed their use of Creative Commons licenses.
I hope to get a tape, because it was a fascinating hour. One of the most amazing stories was by HIRAYAMA Masahiro describing the community that has developed around his poetry.
It struck me that this is the key to spreading this idea: Stories by creators about how free culture spreads.
My main reason for this trip to Japan was this event at NTT-ICC. ICC is a great exhibit and cultural center (needs to be added to "Just In Tokyo" v2.0), and the event yesterday was a discussion of Creative Commons Japan Hiroo Yamagata (a brilliant many-things, and translator, who has no blog nor television), and Joi (who was on the same plane to Tokyo as I and is a complete bum -- he fell asleep about 20 minutes after the plane took off and woke up about 10 minutes before we landed) and I were on the panel. The discussion should be streamed soon.
The room was filled for an afternoon of debate about CC-related issues. This is an astonishing place with a rich and deeply reflective understanding of these issues. And with dinners that always end in commemorating pictures.
Creative Commons has collected a set of freedoms that musicians may want to grant into a new "Music Sharing" license: "download, file-share, copy, and webcast — but not to sell, alter, or make any other commercial uses." It is the latest and not the last innovation in the music space. Stay tuned for lots more.