Lessig

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.

We gave CreativeCommons a weblog and RSS feed this holiday season. It seems happy enough.

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.

Re IPR is unclear, Mark Liberman writes, but as I agree, the idea is very cool. StoryCorps collects recordings of people telling the story of their life, and then deposits them in the Library of Congress.

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.

I pointed to Ping's page last week, without time to comment. There have been some great comments and criticisms, both on my page, and more at Ping's. I've responded to some of these in the extended entry below. But read the discussion linked above. It is much richer than what follows.

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.

As I hope you know, Creative Commons launched the iCommons project to internationalize our licenses. Japan was the first to launch. There will be many more launching through the year.

As part of the process, we've opened up our Flash for others to make derivative works. We're very eager to find people to port the Flash elsewhere. Check it out here.

Creative Commons has won a Prix Ars Electronica Award.

CC's got a great new newsletter that you can subscribe to here.

Creative Commons is hosting a party to celebrate Dan Gillmor's new book, We The Media, Friday, July 30, at our new home, 543 Howard Street, San Francisco. The party starts at 7pm. You should must RSVP to get in (limited space). Send an email to francesca at creative commons dot org.

The full text of Dan Gillmor's book "We the Media," about blogs and other things, is now online. (Thanks to fellow alper Cory Doctorow).

Tickets going fast.

There will be few nights in this boy's life as cool as the Wired/CC Concert. Here are some pictures.

For any KALW (91.7), listeners, tune in Sunday at 2pm for The Creative Remix. More about it here.

Let us know if you can make it by contacting Francesca. Space is limited and filling fast.

The only mag I read cover to cover (except Wired of course!) is Scientific American. So it was a pleasant surprise to find on page 1 (sort of) this editorial endorsing Creative Commons. Alas, you need to pay to read it - but if people can make money spreading the message of CC, more power (or at least, more money) to them.

The wikification of Code has launched. To all the insanely insightful souls who've criticized and extended the book, welcome.

Creative Commons has also taken this opportunity to launch a beta version of a newly branded tweak of an old license -- the CC-Wiki license. We've been talking to wiki developers for some time now. They've been looking for a license that was (1) share alike, but (2) required attribution back to the wiki, rather than to the individual contributors to the wiki. We realized that could be achieved with a very slight change to our existing Attribution-ShareAlike license: rather than requiring attribution back to the copyright holder, require attribution back to either the copyright holder or a designated entity.

So we've made that slight modification to the attribution clause in this beta version, and used it for this wiki. But we won't release the license generally till we've had the ordinary time for discussion. Click here to join a discussion about the license, and any further changes people think we should make.

This is exciting news for us. It confirms great news about Yahoo!. I met their senior management last October. They had, imho, precisely the right vision of a future net. Not a platform for delivering whatever, but instead a platform for communities to develop. With the acquisition of Flickr, the step into blogging and now this tool to locate the welcome mats spread across the net, that vision begins to turn real.

Creative Commons recently launched a relationship with BzzAgent. The blogs were not amused. See Corante, Corante_II , Corante III, Just a Gwai Lo. BzzAgents has now responded poorly, calling Corante "liars." As I'm partial to Corante, I'd be willing to ask CC to pull the relationship on the basis of that bad judgment alone. But I'd be really keen for some feedback.

Here are the facts to keep in mind:

(1) This "partnership" (like all our partnerships) is pro bono: CC doesn't get or give money in these commercial contexts.

(2) The aim of the partnership is to extend our work offline. The vast majority of BzzAgent action occurs offline.

Thanks for the help.

We read; we've discussed; we've lost sleep; we've decided.

Roger Clarke's got a useful "Proposal for Open Content License for Research Paper (Pr)ePrints" that has some nice things to say about Creative Commons licenses.

+=

So read this twice, because it is extraordinary news.

MinusKelvin is a physics and calculus teacher by day. A composer by night. He makes tracks available to podcasters using Creative Commons licenses. On Edison's birthday this year, he joined ccMixter.

Friday we learned that Runoff Records, Inc. has signed MinusKelvin, after discovering him on ccMixter. Together with another ccMixter, Pat Chilla, the label will now be "doing the next three seasons of America's Next Top Model."

As announced yesterday, we've had some significant (and almost all fantastic) changes at Creative Commons. (The exception is described in the next entry). Read more in the extended entry.

I've been living in a state of total denial about this fact, but it's time to confront it. Glenn Brown has left Creative Commons to take a job at Google (tftlt)(too famous to link to). This is fantastic news for Glenn. It is of course a big loss for us. Not unexpected -- there's only so far one can grow (and only so long one can sacrifice) in a nonprofit. But even if it has always been expected, we will all feel his absence for a long long time.

Glenn was CC's second ED. Molly Shaffer Van Houweling incubated the project as a fellow at Stanford before she became a professor of law at Michigan. I was very proud to convince Glenn to replace Molly. Glenn was (is) young. He had just completed a clerkship after just completing law school. He had been a student of mine at Harvard. But despite being young, I knew from that time that he would be the ideal executive director to get Creative Commons launched.

He was first, and crucially, a lawyer. That was essential to an organization that gives away free licenses. But more importantly, he has a sense of message and design that I knew we crucially needed. He is a beautiful writer, a perfectionist in all things expressive, and he worked as hard as anyone could to focus and lead Creative Commons to spread our meme. He was the perfect antidote to an organization started by a bunch of professors, and he built extraordinary loyalty and devotion from everyone within our team. On his watch, the brand was born, and the licenses spread from zero to over 12,000,000. He more than any other single person made Creative Commons.

We miss him (though he still yells at me whenever I screw up (or whenever he notices)). And I am forever grateful for the extraordinary work this startup-CEO accomplished.

As described in the previous post, Neeru has taken charge of the Culture Commons project. Mia has taken over his role as GC. And I'm to be the one to build the loyalty and inspiration of the remaining CC team -- though nothing I could ever do would come close to his amazing success.

To those living in, and building, the free world, please join me in thanking this extraordinary leader in whatever way you can.

Matt's angry about an article in Billboard that is being distributed by Reuters. The article deserves some context.

Last December, Billboard published a piece by its legal affairs editor, Susan Butler. The piece opened with a quote from Michael Sukin, "founding member of the International Association of Entertainment Lawyers," saying that Creative Commons had emerged as a "serious threat to the entertainment industry." The piece then asserted:

The nonprofit organization--also known as Creative Commons--urges creators to give up their copyright protection--which lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years under U.S. law--by selling their copyrights to the commons for $1,according to its Web site. In return, the authors receive certain rights that they can use for either 14 or 28 years, or they can donate all rights to the pubic domain for everyone to use.

The "movement," Sukin stated, had "spread like a virus" and "U.S. copyright income" could be at risk.

The hyperbole from Mr. Sukin -- a lawyer -- was funny. But what struck me in the article was the assertion by Butler that "Creative Commons urges creators to give up their copyright protection" in exchange for $1. I couldn't begin to understand what she was talking about. Obviously, our licenses enable artists to choose to waive certain rights -- while retaining others. (Remember: "Some Rights Reserved"). But they are licenses of a copyright; they couldn't function if you had "give[n] up" copyright protection. The vast majority of creators adopting Creative Commons licenses keep commercial rights, while giving away noncommercial rights (2/3ds). It's hard to see how waiving noncommercial rights would do anything to "U.S. copyright income."

So I contacted Butler to ask her what she was talking about. We connected over email, and she said she'd check into it. She then pointed me to the Founders' Copyright, which indeed does offer $1 in exchange for someone limiting a copyright to 14, or 28 years. I had frankly forgotten about the way the Founders' Copyright functioned, mainly because nothing we do today has anything to do with that license, as Evan pointed out in his birthday wish for the still-born license. As far as I knew at that point, precisely 3 works have been licensed under this license (my own books). O'Reilly is processing more. But to describe the work of Creative Commons as this is either to listen to Mr. Sukin without checking the facts, or not to care about the facts. You could say, for example, that Billboard is a publication that publishes letters to the editor, and that would technically be true. But obviously, though technically true, it would be a totally false characterization of what Billboard is.

I therefore suggested the story should be corrected. It wasn't. Instead, a month or so ago, we learned that the same writer had been assigned to write an "indepth" story about Creative Commons. I thought the idea a bit odd. I raised its oddness to the magazine. According to their standards of truth, what Susan Butler had published before was correct. They were confident that she would produce the same again.

That, of course, was my fear as well.

The Billboard piece is beautifully written -- indeed, it has a cadence to it that is masterful. There's a tide -- in and out -- of good, crested with criticism, all building to the part that got Matt so angry -- as he put it, the suggestion that Creative Commons "kills people with AIDS."

Yet it's very interesting to map the structure of the argument. The piece has some quotes from me, and Hal Abelson in support. It quotes two people opposed. One of the two is Mr. Sukin again. The other is David Israelite, president of the National Music Publishers' Association.

Israelite doesn't actually say any about us. He's worried about the people we hang around with. As he says,

"My concern is that many who support Creative Commons also support a point of view that would take away people's choices about what to do with their own property."

"Israelite says that often when people give away their own property under a Creative Commons license, 'it is really an argument why others should be forced to give away their property.'"

I love it when people tell me what my argument "really" is. The whole premise of Creative Commons is that artists choose. We give licenses to creators. How exactly empowering creators is "really an argument why others should be forced to give away their property" is bizarre to me. By this reasoning, when Bill Gates give $20,000,000,000 to help poor people around the world, that's an argument for socialism.

Sukin's criticism is even more bizarre. Butler quotes him as saying "Lessig and his followers advocate a shorter copyright term." The link this point has to Creative Commons is left obscure by the author. The RIAA believes it is appropriate to sue kids for downloading music. They're supporters of Creative Commons. Does it follow that Creative Commons supports suing kids for downloading music? There are a wide range of supporters of Creative Commons, many of whom disagree about many matters fundamental. I should think that's a virtue of Creative Commons, not a vice.

There is one part to the piece, however, that does bothered. Not the dramatic flair at the end (this is Hollywood, remember. What would a story be without a villain killing a victim with AIDS in the end). The extraordinary part to me was the following:

The brief, which proposed affirming the appellate decision against RIAA and MPAA members, described the Creative Commons as a group with an award-winning project endorsed by many, including ex-RIAA chief Rosen and former MPAA leader Jack Valenti. It also listed as supporters the artists whose music was on the Wired CD.

The piece then goes on to describe an apparent conversation that Butler had with Rosen, in which Rosen apparently objected to how she understood how her name was used. The reporter thus becomes actor, stirring up a controversy about whether the target of her piece has misbehaved.

Here's the brief. As you'll see when you read it, we mention Rosen and Valenti in the section titled "Interest of Amicus" -- a part of an Amicus brief which explains who the organization filing the brief is. What we say is this:

"The project has been endorsed by former MPAA president Jack Valenti, and by former president of the RIAA Hilary Rosen."

No where in the brief do we suggest that Rosen or Valenti supported the argument we make in the brief. What we assert is that they endorsed the "project" -- which they have.

More extraordinary is the statement about the artists who were on the Wired CD. Again, here's what Butler wrote:

"[The brief] also listed as supporters the artists whose music was on the Wired CD."

"As part of a feature about Creative Commons, Wired magazine has released a CD with 16 tracks licensed under a Creative Commons license by artists including, among others, the Beastie Boys, David Byrne, Gilberto Gil, Chuck D, and Le Tigre."

Notice, the brief says nothing about the artists being "supporters" of Creative Commons. It simply lists who was on the CD. Butler's statement -- that we listed them "as supporters" -- is just false.

Now you might think, well, cut her a break. She's just a journalist writing for Billboard. But again and again, Butler reminded me that she had in fact been a practicing lawyer. Her editors indicated the same. So I don't quite know how to understand a lawyer who can't read an amicus brief -- or for that matter, a lawyer who doesn't know the difference between putting something "into the public domain" and licensing it. These could well just be mistakes, of course. But they are surprising from someone with the experience she has.

The fair criticism of the article is that we don't do enough to warn people, or to push them to consult a lawyer first. That's a good point, and we're thinking about ways to enable referrals, and to do more than we already do to educate. Help here would be greatly appreciated.

It's also true, as Butler says, that there's a "blurring" between Creative Commons and the views of people like me (though my view of course is far from the view criticized by Israelite). I'd love -- really really love -- to find someone to replace me who might erase such a blur. I am not Creative Commons. It was not my idea. I am just devoting as much time as I can to push its message, and the tools it enables. I'd be very happy to find a way to spend less.

My favorite part of the article is the quote from Cary Sherman at the RIAA. God bless that man. As he is quoted,

"If a creator wants to dedicate his work to the world or wants to allow others to use it with the promise to credit the author, there has been no mechanism in place to provide public notice," RIAA president Cary Sherman says. "The Commons approach would basically solve this problem."

Exactly right. We're giving artists free tools. What they do with them is their choice. There are many who believe, as Butler quotes Andy Fraser to say, that "[n]o one should let artists give up their rights." "Let." Read that word again: "let."

In my view, it is the artists who have the rights. And no one should take the role of deciding what we "let" artists do. Neither should anyone interfere with artists doing what they think best. Of course, and again, education is key. No one should be tricked. No one should waive rights without understanding what their doing. But neither should anyone think themselves entitled to wage war against artists doing what artists choose. Or if they do want to wage such a war, then let's at least be open about the paternalism in the position. If we're not going to "let" artists select Creative Commons licenses, then are we going to "let" them sign recording deals? Because I promise you this: there are many many more artists who are upset with their recording deals than with the spread they've enabled using Creative Commons licenses.

Butler's first article stated that Mr. Sukin is "lobbying" against Creative Commons. It's time we have an open conversation, Mr. Sukin. I challenge you to the sort of duel decent people engage: a debate. Let's let both sides be heard, and let's then "let" the artists decide.

So day two of a fantastic conference at Wits, in South Africa. Sponsored by the LINK Centre, the conference celebrates the launch of Creative Commons South Africa. The conference is being covered by 15 students and a couple staff members from the New Media Lab at the Rhodes University School of Journalism and Media Studies. The site has moblog, video links, blog, pictures and audio -- basically one of the best examples of real time conference coverage that I've seen. What they've done would be amazing enough in the core of Silicon Valley. But in this network-thin space, it is really extraordinary.

Following my whining about a copyright agreement I was asked by Minnesota Law Review to sign (and an update to that complaint: Minnesota was very gracious about changing the contract once I asked them), Dan Hunter of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and Michael Carroll of Villanova Law School, and on the Creative Commons board, began pulling together an Open Access Law Project, as part of the Science Commons.

On Monday, the project launched. The project has developed and will maintain three distinct threads.

The first is a statement of Open Access Law (OAL) Journal Principles. Twenty-two journals have signed on so far.

The second is an OAL Author's Pledge, which authors who published in law journals can take to signal their willingness to publish in OAL journals only. I've signed this pledge, and will be working to recruit others as well.

Finally, we have drafted a OAL Model Publishing Agreement that is consistent with the principles of the OAL Project.

We were motivated to launch this project by the recognition that in fact, there is no substantial institutional resistance to open access publishing in law. The major commercial publishers of online journals, Lexis and Westlaw, don't require exclusivity. Any resistance is therefore primarily inertia. Our hope was to coordinate efforts to overcome this inertia, and make access to legal materials cheaper and more universal.

Each part of this project will evolve as we learn more about how best to achieve these goals. We're looking for more feedback, and are opening a discussion list for input.

You can help this project by encouraging other authors and journals to sign on. If you're a law student, then send an email to your professors asking them to join. The same with law journals you might have connections with. We are eager to establish a minimum set of Open Access Law standards quickly, so that others can begin to experiment with better, more ambitious, ideas.

This project is also significant for a more CC-local reason. This is the first project chaired completely outside the organization. I'm grateful to Dan Hunter for his work. His success is a model I hope we can implement elsewhere as well. We've got a million ideas for expanding the commons. But we only have a few overworked souls at Creative and Science Commons to carry them into effect. If we can identify other efficient and hard working souls like Dan to volunteer on a project, we can expand our work more quickly. Ideas welcome.

After notice and a period for comments, Creative Commons has versioned the attribution clause in our licenses. The new clause does something cool I wanted to flag. The essence of the change is to permit the copyright holder to specify what the attribution should be. Thus attribution can be to the author, or to another entity (e.g., the Wiki, or the journal in which the article was first published), or both, as the licensor specifies.

The motivation for this change was both to formalize the CC-Wiki license, which is a rebranded CC Attribution-ShareAlike licenses. With this new attribution clause, a wiki can now specify that attribution is back to the wiki. A second motivation was to help open access publishing: Now the author can require a citation that would include the original journal in which the article appeared — something many journals we eager to have in return for permitting open access publishing.

As of Thursday, the current spread of Creative Commons. The green are countries where the project has launched. The yellow are close. The red is yet to be liberated.

So we're looking for two fantastic people at Creative Commons -- one to help us with development, and one to replace the irreplaceable Neeru Paharia, who is going to get her PhD at Harvard. The job descriptions are here: Development, ED-CreativeCommons.

The Duke Law School offers an explanation of its leadership in the Open Access Law movement. Of course, that part of the world is responsible for lots of important movements of freedom, and that law school is particularly responsible.

You'll find at the Microsoft IEBlog an announcement that will surprise some. I'm happy it doesn't surprise me.

Following Dave Winer's decision to release his spec for RSS 2.0 under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, Microsoft has now released its spec for "Simple Feed Extensions" under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

This isn't the first Microsoft site licensed under a Creative Commons license. There's a very cool PatternShare site that builds on Microsoft research licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. But this is the first under a ShareAlike license. That's right - the "copyleft" "ShareAlike" license. People are free to modify and redistribute the spec so long as the modifications are licensed under a similar license.

Also notable is Microsoft's representations regarding patent:

As to software implementations, Microsoft is not aware of any patent claims it owns or controls that would be necessarily infringed by a software implementation that conforms to the specification's extensions. If Microsoft later becomes aware of any such necessary patent claims, Microsoft also agrees to offer a royalty-free patent license on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions to any such patent claims for the purpose of publishing and consuming the extensions set out in the specification.

These steps signal important flexibility and sophistication within Microsoft. For anyone who knows people at that place, this is old news. But even if old news, very very good news.

We're moblogging the Creative Commons iCommons-Summit.

From the PBS website:

Beginning Sept. 6, PBS will make available - exclusively over the Internet - broadcast television's first entirely downloadable series, featuring PBS technology columnist and industry insider Robert X. Cringely's interviews with personalities from the ever-changing world of technology.

"This ground-breaking series will be distributed under a Creative Commons license, so if viewers like what they see, they can redistribute the shows or even edit their own non-commercial version," Cindy Johanson, Senior Vice President, PBS Interactive Learning, said.

Here's a site with music by Anthony Raijekov, a fantastic Bulgarian musician, licensed under the ShareMusic (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives) CC-license. This is part of the Bulgarian Open-Content.Net project.

Here's a site with music by Anthony Raijekov, a fantastic Bulgarian musician, licensed under the ShareMusic (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives) CC-license. This is part of the Bulgarian Open-Content.Net project.

Today, Creative Commons launches a fund raising campaign. The trigger is some bizarrely complicated requirement of the IRS that nonprofits demonstrate not just support from some large, wise, foundations, but also "public support." So we've got an (urgent) need to demonstrate that support, through, well, support.

Over the course of the campaign, I'm going to be writing a weekly email that lays out the story of Creative Commons. There will be some surprise guest email authors as well as some replies to critics, and lots of reflection. You can subscribe to the letters here. They'll be short and again just weekly. The first one is posted here. And of course, please, whatever you can, you can support Creative Commons here.

So I'm having some fun writing up this history and future of Creative Commons, which I'm doing as penance for the fund raising campaign. If you'd like to read week 2, it's here. If you'd like to give something to support Creative Commons, you can do so here. And if you read what I've written without supporting Creative Commons, well, we'll just see how things turn out for you (and us, I guess).

Here's week 3 in my letters about Creative Commons.

At an event for potential donors to Creative Commons last night, a representative from Google announced that Google's "advanced search" would now allow results to be filtered by Creative Commons licenses.

This is of course very exciting news. It confirms a decision Yahoo! made months ago when it revealed a (much more explicitly Creative Commons) search portal. Ever since I had the chance to meet with the top Yahoo! executives over a year ago, I've known that Yahoo!'s future depends upon building creator-approved freedoms. Their joining with Flickr! is just part of this overall, creator-driven strategy. That meeting convinced me that Yahoo! understood more than most the growth and innovation that can be built through these creativity communities. And that's of course what Creative Commons believes as well.

Google's move here is therefore reassuring. I'm hopeful it signals a much broader recognition. I've been a staunch defender of Google's fair use of creative content. That's the subject of this month's column in Wired. But as well as fair use rights, which we all should defend, there will be important growth enabled by making it easier for creators and authors to exercise their freedom to enable others to build up or share their work. This is the thing Yahoo! seems to get, imho. That the rest of the world gets it is my strongest hope.

This is still not the first Microsoft site licensed under a CC license, but it was very cool to read this from Ray Ozzie in his blog entry announcing Microsoft's latest CC-licensed spec, Simple Sharing Extension: Writes Ray: "I’m very pleased that Microsoft is supporting the Creative Commons approach ...."

Me2.

The Science Commons needs a lawyer.

So we have 10 days left in the Creative Commons campaign. This is not a drill. We are down to the last $100,000, and really need your support -- both for the very cool projects we're launching (see, e.g., the license interoperability project, discussed recently in Technology Review, and the two new projects announced this week), and for the very uncool pressure we're under from IRS regulations to demonstrate "public support" as a condition for keeping our (absolutely essential as in we can't live with out it) tax exempt status. So please, anything helps. Lots of anything helps lots.

It was a good first day -- $25,000. At this rate, I can take off Christmas. Thanks to everyone for spreading the word, and thanks to the amazing mix of people who have been giving. Any bit counts. So please jump here and let's finish this already.

Just about $7500 a day needed. Spread the word. Spread CC. Support here.

Ok, these annoying posts will end, hopefully before my readership disappears. But we are extremely close. We've got three days left, and are within $25,000 of meeting our goal.

There have been lots of great questions about the goal, about what happens if we miss it, and about why we need money anyway ("aren't the licenses already written?"). We should have done better explaining all this upfront. My fault for not seeing that more clearly. But from the better-late-than-never department, here is a bit to address some of these questions.

(1) Where'd you get the goal of $225,000?

To understand this, you need to know something about the "public support test" that is part of the IRS review all tax-exempt non-profits suffer after 4 years of life. That test essentially asks, how diverse is your funding support. If most of your support comes from a few foundations, then there's a risk you'll lose your tax exempt status. I let this issue remain unresolved for too long. But this is the year the numbers will be calculated, and hence the push right now.

When we saw how much we needed to raise to pass the test, we divided up areas of support. The $225,000 is the amount we absolutely must raise from a general public appeal. If we meet that, and the other goals we've also set, then we're fine.

(2) What happens if we fail this test?

The risk is that we'll lose our public charity status. That's critical to us because some foundations are not able to support organizations without a public charity status. And however fantastic the support from the public has been so far, we still absolutely must continue to get foundation support.

(3) What do you need the money for anyway?

This is the core question I should have done lots more to address much earlier in this process. For its clear many people think CC's just a bunch of servers serving licenses. Indeed, that's precisely what CC will always be -- we've built a contingency plan to assure our licenses are served for a "limited time" (in the sense that copyright terms are for "limited times"). But right now, we're much more than a bunch of servers.

As I explained in the final post to the Lessig Letters, CC has a staff of about 20 people world wide. (I'm technically on the staff as its CEO, but I'm unpaid). Those twenty work in four separate offices. Our Berlin office manages the process of porting licenses internationally. Our London office is building the international community of the iCommons project. Boston runs the Science Commons project. And San Francisco does all the rest. That staff is underpaid (relative to their contemporaries at least), but even at bargain basement wages, it is not cheap to keep the lights on. One fourth of the staff is technical; three are lawyers. All are working extraordinarily hard to spread and build CC.

We're proud of the fact that a very high percentage of our funds goes directly to "programs and services." (82% in 2004, with 18% spent on administration, and 8% on fundraising. See our audited statements for 2004 posted here. But that's 82% of a large number. We expect that to accomplish all we've promised in 2006, our budget will be close to $2m.

What have we promised? Well, in addition to growing license adoption, and spreading the tools to integrate CC into critical content creating apps, I've signaled four key projects for the year. Two we've been quite public about: (1) the cc-commercial project, and (2) the free content license interoperability project. And then there are two more secret projects that I've described here. This is the work we have left to do. This is the work that needs your support.

So three more days if this pestering. Or one, if we can get $25,000 in the door by tomorrow.

Support CC here.

We're almost there, but the coolest (and something I had missed) is this Flickr match: $10k from Flickr and a challenge to the community to match it.

Support CC.

At 12:30pm, an envelope from Redmond appeared at the Creative Commons office. Inside, a check for $25,000. From Microsoft.

We've made our target in the most (pleasantly) surprising of ways. Thanks to everyone who helped on this, and especially those who pulled so hard at the end. Of course, more will still help lots, so no reason to stop now. Support CC.

We beat the target by lots. When all the check from the mail were counted, by about $30,000. And then by about $120,000 when we add the downpayment on the biggest surprise -- a $1,000,000 gift by someone who (for now) is anonymous. More as soon as we can, but for now, thanks to everyone.

Photo CC-BY licensed by Lainmoon.

A special invitation to Lessig-Blog readers: On Friday, February 17, at 6 pm, Elisabeth Shue will introduce Davis Guggenheim's newly CC licensed film, Teach. This extraordinary film grows out of Guggenheim's Peabody Award winning film, The First Year. The film is about 30 minutes long, and there's a reception afterwards.

To attend, you MUST RSVP. The event will be held at the San Francisco LGBT Community Center, at 1800 Market Street, San Francisco. Come if you can, but again, RSVP if you want to come.

Creative Commons Japan and Japan's National Institute of Informatics are hosting a symposium Monday, March 27. The CCJP event is in the morning (info); NII's is in the afternoon (info: JP; EN).

Sun has made recent announcements about their openDRM project. In my view, they've made some commitments that are important for any DRM project. E.g., as I've seen it described, it would be implemented to allow individuals to assert "fair use," and unlock DRM'd content, with a tag to trace misuse. And they've described a platform upon which authors keep the freedom to turn the DRM off, and more the content from the secured platform.

These are good things. But some confuse praise for better DRM with praise for DRM. So let me be as clear as possible here (though saying the same thing I've always said): We should be building a DRM-free world. We should have laws that encouraged a DRM-free world. We should demonstrate practices that make compelling a DRM-free world. All of that should, I thought, be clear. But just as one can hate the Sonny Bono Act, but think, if there's a Sonny Bono Act, there should also be a Public Domain Enhancement Act, so too can one hate DRM, but think that if there's DRM, it should be at least as Sun is saying it should be.

You know about Creative Commons, and Creative Commons licenses. Key to the CC strategy was to port Creative Commons licenses into jurisictions across the world. More than 30 countries have now launched CC licenses; another fifty in the works. As of the launch of Malta last week, this is CC world:

The green countries have already launched. The yellow countries will launch in the next six months. And the red countries are still, well, red.

This project of porting CC licenses we originally called the "iCommons Project." But last year, we renamed the project Creative Commons International. iCommons became its own (UK-based) non-profit. In June of last year, we held the first iCommons Summit in Boston. In June of this year (23-25) we'll hold the second -- in Rio.

The aim of iCommons reaches far beyond the infrastructure that CC is building. The aim of the iSummit is to bring together a wide range of people in addition the CC crowd - including Wikipedians, Free Software sorts, the Free Culture kids, A2K heroes, Open Access advocates, and others -- to "to inspire and learn from one another and establish closer working relationships around a set of incubator projects." iCommons has a separate board from Creative Commons -- Joi Ito is its chair -- and its ultimate mission (in addition to this annual moveable feast of commons conversation) will be determined by the conversation that will continue in Rio.

The event will be extraordinary. Gilberto Gil will perform. Jimmy Wales will inspire. Joi Ito will direct. The only thing I can promise about me is that this year, I won't be thrown into the pool.

So come. Or if you can't, help others come by donating to the scholarship fund, or at least put our ‘donate button‘ on your website.

Mathias Klang from the fantastically cool freculture country of Sweden (see my favorite, atmo.se, and very interesting (though you know my ambivalence about this word), Piracy Party) is publishing his PhD dissertation on Disruptive Technologies. He needs a cover design. So he's running a competition. If you're talented (or maybe even not!) and would like to help a PhD (which will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license), check out the competition here.

Just got off the plane to Rio where we're holding the second iCommons iSummit, so this is a bit delayed. But today, Microsoft has released a free Office plug-in that enables you to mark Office documents (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) with Creative Commons licenses. This has been in the works for a while, and is an extremely cool development. The plug-in will modify the FILE menu, adding an item "Creative Commons" and then when selected, link the user out to the CC site to select a license to be inserted into the license. The first document licensed with the tool is a speech by Brazil's Culture Minister and supercool musician, Gilberto Gil, about tropicalism. (en) (pt).

Before I got on the plane yesterday, I was on some press calls about the announcement. Many were surprised CC and Microsoft would work together. Ever the naive law professor, that surprise surprises me. Office is a tool for creating. Giving the creator more control over that creativity is a way to make the Office platform more valuable to creators. And by incorporating CC licenses, more valuable to the public.

"But isn't it strange for MSFT and Lessig to team-up?" I was asked. Well, I have yet gotten the team jersey, but no, it isn't. Microsoft has been on the right side of a number of important issues -- spectrum, net neutrality, identity -- and I'm very glad they're on the right side of this issue too. Giving creators the tools to mark their creativity with the freedoms they intend it to carry is a fantastically good thing to do.

"But it's just for the Windows platform, isn't it?" True enough. Now we need some enterprising sort to make a plug-in for Office on the Mac, as well as Garageband, OpenOffice, and many others. Let the competition begin.

At the iCommons iSummit in Rio, Revver demonstrated its technology. This company is a poster child for alternative ways to get creators paid. Videos are distributed under a CC license. At the end is an ad bug. When the video is played, the creators get paid. The creators of the video below (geniuses) have earned many many many thousands of dollars for this video. Watch, think, enjoy: (Innovation brought to you by the Neutral Net). (I'm experimenting with the feature of Revver that feeds revenue back to the syndicator. Anything I get will be donated to charity.) (And Michael is my new hero -- thank you for the poster!)

Phillipp Lenssen has written "55 Ways to Have Fun with Google". The book is available for sale in book stores, and downloadable for free under a CC license.

So I'm back on the grid, after a (never long enough) break with my family. Nothing is as cool as my kid. And though returning is tough, this news was great to return to:

You'll recall my over-the-top (but completely accurate) praise for Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks. That was published by Yale University Press, which allowed Yochai to release the book under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license (you must give attribution, you can make only noncommercial uses of the work, and any derivative must be under the same license).

Today, Jack Balkin wrote to say that Yale has now permitted him to release his book, Cultural Software, under the same CC license. Balkin's book (published in 1998) resolves a plainly more academic debate. But it uses metaphors from computer science to develop a theory of how cultures evolve. Balkin is a friend, and long before a friend, mentor for me. Nothing could make me happier than to see his great book within the CC family.

CC Salon is happening tomorrow - Wednesday, August 9th - from 6-9pm at Shine in San Francisco. CC Salon is a free, casual monthly get-together focused on conversation, networking, and presentations from people or groups who are developing projects that relate to open content and tools. CC Salon SF is now being presented in conjunction with CopyNight SF.

This month's line-up of speakers includes Hemai Parthasarathy and Barbara Cohen of the Public Library of Science, Owen Byrne of Digg, and John Buckman of Magnatune. Shannon Coulter will be DJing a set of CC music from Magnatune's catalogue.

For more information, visit this event's Upcoming.org listing.

Creative Commons' free software project, ccHost, a project that "provides web-based infrastructure to support collaboration, sharing, and storage of multi-media using the Creative Commons licenses and metadata," has been named the "Best Open Source Solution" at LinuxWorld 2006. ccHost supports ccMixter. See some pictures of those who support ccHost.

From Eric at CC:

Visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's website to download "The Concert," a new classical music podcast offered under the Creative Commons Music Sharing license. The podcast features unreleased live performances by master musicians and talented young artists recorded from the museum's Sunday Concert Series. "The Concert" includes music by Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and Chopin for solo piano, orchestra, string quartet, and voice. A new podcast will be posted on the 1st and 15th of every month; users can subscribe to receive free, automatic updates delivered directly to their computers or mp3 players. With "The Concert," the Gardner Museum becomes the first art museum to encourage sharing and free distribution of its online programming by using a Creative Commons license.

You can read more about this exciting news in CC's press release.

So there was a flurry of concern last week because of the announcement that Microsoft's new Zune would wrap all content in DRM. Turns out that was a mistake. All content is not wrapped by default. The wrapping applies to DRMed content only. Thus, the device would not appear to interfere with the CC anti-DRM clause.

Wired is sponsoring another Creative Commons Benefit Concert at at Irving Plaza, on September 29. This is the second time Wired's done this. The first time, the artists (Gilberto Gil and David Byrne) were inspiration to many in the movement. This time the artists are practitioners of remix culture: Mike Patton's experimental pop supergroup Peeping Tom, DJ/producer Diplo, and mash-up/remix artist Girl Talk.

All (as in 100% with no deduction at all) of the proceeds go to Creative Commons. Tickets are $25 each (plus service charge) and are available online at Ticketmaster.

The event is a part of Next Music, which kicks off WIRED NextFest, a four-day festival featuring more than 130 interactive exhibits from scientists and researchers from around the world.

The British Council and Counterpoint has a new publication, "Unbounded Freedom: A Guide to Creative Commons Thinking for Cultural Organizations," written by Rosemary Bechler. The book will be launched Friday. There's a discussion page on the author's blog, which begins with a useful post addressing the question: "So why did I choose to licence my work in this way?"

I'm just ending the last insane 3 week period in and for a long time (round the world, and almost back to Berlin), and I'll be writing more about this early next week when I get a chance to breathe, but this week Creative Commons launches its second annual fundraising campaign. More soon about why we might merit your support, but for those ready to help without the pitch, here's the code:

<a href="http://creativecommons.org/support/">
<img src="http://creativecommons.org/images/support/2006/spread-3.gif" border="0"/></a>

At the top of favorite articles about CC, this one by Mark Glaser.

With the launch of the second Creative Commons fundraiser, I have begun again a series of letters about Creative Commons.

The first letter is here. (Spanish -- thanks to Maria Cristinia Alvite)

The second is here.

The archive of letters (including last year's) is here.

You can subscribe to them here.

Or you can just donate $300,000 here and we can call the whole thing off.

Joi Ito and Paul Twomey meet Ivailo Kalfin, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bulgaria. The Bulgarian Foreign Ministry then announces that all its published content is licensed under a CC-BY license, as is the Minister's blog.

Read all about it: from Veni Markovski; from Joi.

So I decided this year I would respond personally to everyone who has donated to CC. Each Paypal donation sends a copy to me, and I write a note in response. (An official tax-ready thank you gets generated by some machine later, but I wanted the first cut at the thanks).

It is an amazing process. I had expected I would know most who would donate; I know practically no one. They come from across the world, in every amount, some sometimes give twice.

I can't express adequately how grateful I am to those who support us. Partly that's the technology -- most imagine the emails must be machine-generated; partly that's the limits to language -- we practice overusing "thank you"; how can we mean it when we really do?

Anyway, thank you again. (And I apologize if I'm a bit behind. I'll get through all of them.)

So we've launched a hack of the advertising system to try to raise funds for CC a bit differently. This is a new CC video (3 minutes). It's been Revverized -- meaning at the end is an ad. When people watch the video through to the ad, we get paid. Thus, by spreading and watching our video, you can help CC. And if this technique works, maybe others as well.

You can see all our videos here. All of them have now been Revverized, though of course, we also make them available in an ad-free way. But the more who watch the Revver version, the more we raise.

So if you'd like a simple (and cheap) way to help CC, please use the email form to send the videos page to your 10,000 best friends. Ask them to send it to their 10,000 best friends. And them, to their 15,000 best friends. And soon we'll be finished with the fundraising for the year.

Or again, alternatively, click here to donate $300,000 and we can call the whole thing off.

From CC:

Today, Creative Commons launched the first CC Swag Photo Contest on Flickr to promote our Annual Fundraising Campaign. The photo must be of CC Swag (t-shirts, buttons, stickers, etc. — all available from the Support the Commons store) and the winners will have their photos used on Creative Commons' informational postcards, which will be distributed internationally to promote CC and the winning photographers. Winners will receive 100 copies of the postcard with their photo. The winners will also be able to choose a Creative Commons board member to record a personalized outgoing voicemail announcement — that's right, your friends can be greeted by Jimmy Wales every time they call you! For more information, please visit the contest page and read the rules.

This is easily the coolest technology I've seen in years: Go to the Creative Commons search page. Click on the OWL Music Search tab. (Depending upon the browser, you might need to run a fake search to get it to come alive -- we're working on this, but just type anything in the search bar). You'll then see OWL's Music Search interface. Drop an MP3 on OWL. It will analyze it and show you similar sounding Creative Commons licensed music. You select the part of the song you want to match; it finds the closest match it can find.

Glyn Moody agrees.

(Note, this is version .3, so enjoy to get the concept clear. )

So we've just passed the half-way mark on the CC fundraising campaign, and I've cleaned out my inbox of people to thank for their contribution (too many $3.50 contributions, to which I've not been personally responding as I assume these are Flickr contest entries, and one $10k contribution this morning, to which I responded very well). So feel free to fill the inbox again.

Just as last year, we have a continuing obligation to demonstrate public support to the IRS. And also to me. So let this campaign invade the Christmas season. And fear not -- we've not sold so many t-shirts that they won't still be cool.

Give and give again.

My CC fundraising letter this week describes the launch of CC Labs -- a test bed for new CC technologies. There's a new licensing engine that emphasizes more clearly the freedoms you're enabling. Toggling through the options gives you a very clear sense of the contours of the CC licenses.

The most important experiment, however, is also the hardest to describe. We've begun testing an architecture that will enable people to specify (in the metadata attached to the license) where to go for rights, or stuff, beyond those specified in the license. Thus, for example, if you're a Flickr snapper, and license your photos under a noncommercial license, you can specify in the metadata who or where someone should go to clear commercial rights. (See, e.g., Scoopt)

So here's an example. Gary New Vision's got a mySpace page. On that page, you can download some of his music. That music is licensed under a CC BY-NonCommercial license. But if you click on the CC icon, the Commons Deed now tells you where you can go to license the music commercially.

As I explain in the extended entry, this "rights beyond" link need not be to commercial rights. It could be a tip jar, or t-shirts, or even another CC license. Thus, anyone offering content under a CC-NC license should, in my view, offer an alternative licenses as well -- CC-BY-SA -- which would mean the content could also be included within copyleft projects. But more on that soon ...

The tech here has been tricky, no doubt. But the hardest part will be to begin to make clear the potential this added capacity adds. Read below, and if you've got any great ideas, I'd be eager to hear them.

(continued)

Creative Commons is turning 4 on December 16. To celebrate, there are a host of parties springing up around the world. You can read about it on this blog entry. I'll be in Portugal to launch CC Portugal, but will be getting up early to make a Second Life appearance at the San Francisco event. If you can't make it to a physical party, come virtually. I'll be making a pretty significant announcement (for me at least) at the party.

Creative Commons turns four tomorrow. On December 16, 2002, in San Francisco, we launched this licensing project. Within a year, there were a million licenses. Within two years, 12m. Within three years, around 40m. At four, Google reports us close to 150 million licenses. I'm in Portugal to launch the 34th country ported -- with Willem (age 3), who proudly marched around the event with a sticker on his shirt, explaining to everyone that it meant "ke-ative koms."

I'll be in Second Life at the CC pod at 10pm San Francisco time (6am Portugal time) to join the party, and make at least one announcement. But meanwhile, enjoy this fantastic card from one of CC's better ideas -- iCommons.

My retirement plaque, presented by Jimmy Wales. (click to enlarge)

Last week, culminating Friday night, in parties around the world, Creative Commons celebrated its fourth birthday. Hundreds of people helped mark this event. My 3 year old son, Willem, and I cut the first cake at the party in Portugal.

Five hours later, in the Creative Commons party in the virtual world of Second Life, I made (for me an announcement. As I removed the CC torch from my bag of objects, I told those in world, and in San Francisco, that Joi Ito, a venture capitalist from Japan and a key driver in the "sharing economy," would be replacing me as Chairman of Creative Commons. I will remain on the board, and as CEO. But from the moment I handed him the torch, he is CC's new Chairman.

This is a very happy moment for CC. I'm not going anywhere -- CC will continue to get everything I can give. But we are movement, not a cult. And it is important that movements have leaders. I have had enormous respect for Joi since first meeting him in Japan in early 2000. It was a real coup when I was able to convince him to join our Board. Joi's whole ethic has been to build the sharing economy. That ethic of building is precisely where CC is going right now.

This has been the best job I will have had. I can't describe how extraordinary it has been to watch this organization grow, nor how rewarding it has been to see the passion and energy it has inspired. We have tried to show the world something about how creativity works -- not through obsessive control, but by creators inviting others to create and share as well. More and more, this is a message the world seems to get.

But for now, let me leverage a bit the opportunity that the ambiguity of new leadership creates. After the thermometer is updated to reflect a very generous anonymous gift we just received, we will have just $100,000 left in our campaign. That's a lot to raise in two weeks, but I think we can do it. Indeed, you can look at this change in leadership in two ways, each of which gives some of you a reason for one last push:

Finally, thanks to all of you, and the Board of CC in particular, for allowing me this extraordinary opportunity. And join me in helping, and supporting, Joi Ito in his new role.

The best news is the stuff that just happens. Here's an example: As reported by Lisa Williams on Jay Rosen's site, GateHouse Media, a conglomerate "that owns 75 daily and 231 weekly newspapers" has rolled over 96 of its newspaper sites to a Creative Commons license.

I am very proud to report (and not because I used to be a conservative) that Tom Delay has launched a blog, with a new CC license. There's not much I agree with Tom Delay about -- except the freedoms he means his words to carry. Bravo.

Angela Gunn of USAToday on YouTube, MySpace and CC.

This is a fun project I've been pushing inside CC which, thanks to endless work by our GC Mia Garlick and a Stanford student, Dana Powers, has now launched as a beta.

The background is this: US copyright law gives creators an inalienable right to terminate any "transfer" or assignment of copyright after 35 years. The idea was to give the creator a second bite at the apple, an idea that goes back to the first US copyright law.

The problem with the procedure is -- surprise, surprise! -- it is INSANELY complicated. It is almost as if -- AS IF -- it was designed not to be used.

So Creative Commons decided it would take a crack at making the system easier. We've developed a tool that will help an author determine whether or when an assignment is terminable. And our idea is to work with legal aid clinics around the country to refer likely terminators for final termination (it is an irresistible word for us Californians).

At this stage, the tool doesn't refer you. And you should not use or rely on anything that comes from this BETA. But we'd be very eager for people to play around with it and give us feed back on the tool. When we're really confident we've got all the logic right, and it's clear enough, and when we've lined up volunteer projects around the country to represent authors whose transfers are to be terminated, we'll launch the project.

Why is this a Creative Commons project? We've seen CC from the start as a tool to help creators manage an insanely complicated copyright system. When we have this running, we'll offer any copyright owner who has reclaimed his or her rights the opportunity to distribute the work under a CC license. But that will be optional. Right now, we're just offering the tool to make it simpler for authors to get what the copyright system was intended to give them.

Last year it was Microsoft that put us over in our online campaign to raise support for CC. This year, at 5 AM Berlin time (and hence, 8 PM San Francisco time), it was Aaron Swartz who broke the thermometer. Stay tuned for some very cool news about the offline campaign. We should have totals early this week. And thanks to everyone who made this a success.

Details to follow later today, but when you add our offline campaign to the online campaign (and assuming we solidify some pledges made in the final week), we will have bested our goal of $300,000 by some $200,000 -- raising over $500,000 in total. Stay tuned for some interesting surprises (and feel free to give some more in the meantime.)

Two friends of Creative Commons have been nominated for an Oscar: Board member Davis Guggenheim's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (husband of Christiane Henckel von Donnersmarck, original director of Creative Commons International)'s film, The Lives of Others.

(No, we get no tickets.)

It is with sadness that I post that we're looking for a new General Counsel at Creative Commons. After two fantastic years at the legal helm, our current GC, Mia Garlick, like the GC before her, Glenn Brown, has been snatched up by the Google Monster. (It's a nice monster, but very lawyer-hungry).

This is a insanely cool job, though of course, for only non-profit pay. But for anyone eager to move into a more interesting, remake-the-world kind of practice, check out the description on the CC site.

Version 2 of the "freedoms license generator" is now up. Play, and let us know what you think. The aim of the tool is to help develop an intuitive sense of the relationship between the freedoms/constraints of the Creative Commons licenses. It's got a fancy new interface, and is now really fast.

Creative Commons is still accepting applications for summer interns. If you're interested, check it out here.

Jono Bacon intends to record an album in 24 hours on March 30 and 31st, license it under CC, and give the pledged proceeds to charity. He's passed the £1000 mark, aiming for double that.

To anyone at SXSW, a message from CC:

CHALLENGE
We challenge you, our community, to raise $6000 for Creative Commons by subscribing to GOOD Magazine and having a drink with us at the famed South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, TX. All it takes is for 200 people over the next 2 weeks to subscribe to GOOD. No, my math skills are not wrong. If you subscribe in the next 2 weeks your $20 bucks will be generously matched by Six Apart for up to $2000. So you won't just raise $4000 for CC but $6000.

DETAILS
Since July 2006, Creative Commons has been one of the 12 non-profits benefitting from the Choose GOOD campaign. GOOD magazine was started by some innovative people who have taken a non-traditional approach to promoting their magazine - and have experienced unbelievable success. The folks at GOOD have been traveling around the nation hosting parties and more importantly raising money and awareness for the non-profits that they support.

Over the past 7 months they have sold 11,899 subscriptions generating over $200,000 which in turn is gifted to 12 non-profits that are doing new, innovative, and great things. CC is one of them and since July GOOD has raised over $11,000 for us!

We need your help to make GOOD Magazine's SXSW party honoring Creative Commons the most successful party they've hosted to date. Cover charge is the $20 subscription fee and we strongly suggest emailing your rsvp to rsvp@goodmagazine.com.

If you want to help support CC and attend one of GOOD's infamous parties but do not reside in the Austin, TX area don't worry - your subscription fee gets you into any of the upcoming GOOD parties. And yes all parties are open bar.

By subscribing to this awesome new magazine you gain entrance to the biggest GOOD/SXSW party to date and you're helping us raise $6000 for CC. That money will support what we continue to do best - enable a participatory culture.

SXSW GOOD Party details:
with Special Guest Joi Ito, CC Chairman
VJ Phi Phenomenon
DJ Filip Turbotito
Ima Robot
ex Junio Senior

Monday March 12th
Uncle Flirty's
325 E. Sixth St. (on corner of Trinity and Sixth)
Austin, TX

This Event is for GOOD subscribers only

Educause has published a nice short piece about Creative Commons licenses. Of particular interest to me is question 5 -- "What are the downsides?" While I agree there are boundaries to clarify about noncommercial licensing (and more about that soon), I'm not as convinced that there is any ambiguity about the scope of the "share alike" provision. The example considered is of a BY-SA photo included in a report. Does the whole report have to be BY-SA? My view is no — including a picture is not a derivative work of the picture. Some have suggested we expand BY-SA to reach beyond derivative works. We'll be talking about that more soon on the CC list. Meanwhile, I'm grateful to see such good work devoted to explaining our work.

It's pretty here. Watch.

Click on the image to get your tickets.

Creative Commons announced yesterday that we have hired a new General Counsel (and Vice President).

I can't adequately describe the happiness (and relief) that announcement gave me.

The General Counsel is crucial to CC's success. Virginia Rutledge is our third. We've had fantastic general counsels before her. And when each left, while I wished them luck in their new life (at Google), I felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me.

Our first had been the entrepreneur who founded the place. That quality couldn't be replaced. But I was extremely happy when we found someone who could give us something else that we needed then. Like our first, this GC was brilliant and could write extremely well. But she was also a very experienced lawyer (she had practiced and had practiced in other jurisdictions), and she let that experience translate into a very strong will in guiding and protecting our most important asset -- the legal brand.

When she left, I again had doubts we would find a replacement. But again, I am extremely happy to have my doubts proven wrong. Virginia, too, has the tough-lawyer experience that our last GC showed us was so critically important. But beyond that, she also had an extensive life in the community of artists and museums before she turned to the law. Of all the candidates we considered, none could match the breadth and significance of this experience.

From the press release:

“I applaud Creative Commons for its inspired choice of Virginia Rutledge as Vice President and General Counsel,” said copyright expert William Patry, Senior Copyright Counsel, Google Inc. “Virginia’s background in academia, the art world, and the white-shoe corporate law firm environment is unique. Her ability to forge consensus, her love of learning and commitment to the public interest will serve Creative Commons and the rest of us exceedingly well.”

“I commend Creative Commons for this excellent choice to help further the worthy purposes of the organization,” said patron of the arts Martin E. Segal. “Virginia’s commitment to the arts and her scholarly and practical background make her a wonderful addition.”

“Creative Commons couldn’t have made a better choice,” said Joel Wachs, President of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. “Virginia has deep knowledge of contemporary art practices and institutions, and the practical experience of working within a highly competitive corporate culture. She will do an excellent job of helping to build relationships between communities that have a common interest in promoting vibrant cultural production and exchange.”

She will. And as I understand now, this is precisely what we now need.

Monday was an insane day, and I had no time to remark to important facts. First, Creative Commons (new page!) launched its third fall fundraising campaign. The theme is 5. We're five on December 15 (big party, stay tuned). And we've set $500k as our goal -- way beyond what we've targeted before. So please help, any way you can. SupportCC.

As I mentioned last week, we have launched CC's annual fundraising campaign. You can get support buttons for your site or your blog here. They're all based upon the new layout to the CC site. As you can see above, each button frames a different part of the world.

This is an important year for us -- 5th anniversary, etc. It is a difficult time of the year for me. You don't go into academics because you like market tests. And each year, I cower from the test that this campaign is. If we can't grow the number of people supporting CC, we're not doing our job. Period. That sort of simple test doesn't stalk a professor.

But there is no tenure for nonprofits. So we can't avoid this push, and test, each year. Please help make it as simple as possible. Give way more than you can afford. Often.

We're pulling together an important (as in it is important it succeeds) strategy to enlist blogs in the work we're doing to support CC. Thanks to Jardel who has a corner of the Brazilian blogspace. He beat us to the punch.

So Creative Commons desperately needs an new accountant. Our trusty and excellent current accountant is moving on. If you have any ideas, please refer him/her to the job posting. Thanks.

JUMP: 系列 Photographer：老0

From Joi Ito's blog:

I landed in Beijing yesterday at 5AM from Los Angeles and am leaving today at 1PM for New York. From a logistical and environmental perspective, I think this was one of my stupider trips. However, from a content perspective, this was one of my best trips ever. I really met more interesting people, saw more interesting things and had more interesting conversations in a single day than I’ve had in a long time.

I started out the morning yesterday by giving at talk at cnbloggercon organized by Isaac Mao. I gave a talk about the sharing economy and got some interesting questions and hallway conversation about sharing in the context of China. I also got to meet a lot of the Chinese bloggers I only knew by name. Many thank for Isaac and his crew for organizing this excellent annual conference and sorry I haven’t made it over before.

Then I went to the Creative Commons China Photo Content ceremony at the National Library in Beijing. There were 10,000 submissions of professional and amateur works licensed under various CC licenses. There were three categories: Society, Nature and Portraits. Winners were chosen by a panel of judges including famous photographers, professors and other notable people. The photographs were amazing. There is a web page of the winning photographs. Don’t forget to click the link underneath the winning photos for the second place winner gallery.

While we have silly people in the West saying that for every free photo on Flickr a professional photographer loses their job, we have professional photographers in China licensing their best works under CC licenses. As far as I could tell, the amateur and professional photographers seemed integrated and supportive of each other.

After the awards ceremony, we have a workshop with presentations from an illustrious and interesting group of speakers. Overall a groundbreaking and well executed event. Congratulations Chunyan and the CC China team!

I’m uploading photos from my trip in a Flickr set. I found out yesterday that there is a Firefox Plugin to bypass the Chinese block on Flickr. Yay!

Cory Doctorow has a great feature in Locus explaining how CC works.

Use it wisely.

As reported today, Peter Gabriel and the Witness project have launched a site, The Hub, to focus attention on human rights violations. "Users are advised to publish contents under a Creative Commons license."

Some of you have seen the fantastic site we built at CC called "ccMixter." Launched after Wired released a CD which invited people to remix CC licensed music, ccMixter has built a community of remix artists. Thousands of tracks within a system that tracks who remixed what. So, e.g., the technology enables you to say "this track was made by remixing these three tracks, and it has been remixed by these four other tracks." Making transparent the community that is remix, on a platform of CC licensed content.

We launched ccMixter as a demonstration project. As with all our demonstrations, we expected eventually it would spin out to something self-sustaining. How and whether we do that with ccMixter is now something we're beginning to consider. We've asked the ccMixter community about their thoughts about a change. (You can read the missive I sent to them last night in the Extended Entry below). But I wanted to state here some important framing values about this that will not change.

We are considering this change because we want ccMixter to flourish. We could likely continue to support it as it is. It's not cheap, but it isn't terribly expensive. We've been very lucky to have a brilliant musician and technologist (Victor Stone) incubate the project. I'm sure we could persuade him to continue.

But if the ccMixter community is really to flourish, it needs support beyond the support a nonprofit can provide. So we're considering how we might permit that support to be secured.

Here are the principles that will guide this change:

1. CC will not profit off of CC artists: We're not an agency; we will set up no arrangement where the success of CC artists translates into financial success for CC. We're happy to receive gifts from our community; we're not about to receive commissions. We are therefore keen to restructure ccMixter so that any commercial benefit flowing to CC artists won't seem an indirect benefit to CC.

2. ccMixter will never lose its current commerce-free face. It will always be "free" in both the costless and free-speech sense. It will never have ads. It will always be a .org. The community that exists there now can continue just as it exists now. No one will have to make any change to how they contribute to the ccMixter community, if no change is what they want.

3. Any change in ccMixter will be completely transparent, and only with the support of its community. The transparent part of this is simple. The support of the community part is complicated by fiduciary obligations imposed upon a non-profit like CC. But we will work hard to make sure that we do only what the community believes (properly interpreted of course) makes sense. Our ultimate aim here is to enable more for that community. We achieve that aim by understanding it.

4. All the software and creative work will always remain "free": First, the (award winning) code is free (licensed under the GPL); we will contribute the copyrights to that code to the GNU Project as soon as we can convince RMS of the capabilities of the maintainer. Second, the music is free (all licensed under terms that permit at least noncommercial sharing and remix).

I'm sure there will be more that I add to this list as we work through this. But I'd welcome other comments in the comment section to this post. We've not done something like this before. We need lots of eyeballs to make sure we do it right.

To celebrate its 5th birthday (Dec 15), Creative Commons is launching a drive to get 50,000 friends. From the CC Blog:

Through sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr, you can help us broaden our reach and educate the masses about the Creative Commons mission.

So, starting today, we're issuing a 50,000 friend challenge to our community. We'reasking you to help us expand CC's overall friend network to 50,000 people across the Web's various social networking and content sharing sites by December 15 – the date of our fifth birthday party.

Here are some ways you can help our friend network grow. If you aren't a member of any of these sites, please help us by starting (or expanding) a CC group on any site you do use.

• Join our Facebook Cause, become a top recruiter, or become a CC Fan
• Participate in the 2007 CC Swag photo contest on Flickr
• Become a Creative Commons friend on MySpace or Friendster

Of course, you can also help Creative Commons by contributing to our annual fundraising campaign. As always, we thank you sincerely for your support!

As reported at Blognation, German Public Television has started an experiment by licensing two of its shows under a CC license.

For German speakers (and last week, my 4 year old informed me I was not a German speaker and I "should only speak English"), here's a clip explaining the decision:

RSVP.

We received this happy missive in the mail yesterday: The plaintiffs in the lawsuit about Virgin using a CC-licensed photo have dismissed CC from the case. This is not a settlement. It is not the product of negotiation. It is the recognition by plaintiffs counsel that the laws of Texas and the United States give the plaintiffs no cause to sue Creative Commons.

As I said when I announced the lawsuit here, the fact that the laws of the United States don't make us liable for the misuse in this context doesn't mean that we're not working extremely hard to make sure misuse doesn't happen. It is always a problem (even if not a legal problem) when someone doesn't understand what our licenses do, or how they work. We need to work harder to make that clear. But the news today lets us go back to the work of Creative Commons, without the burden of this lawsuit hanging above us.

So how can you celebrate with us? Well, help us recover some of the costs (probably $15k) that we have to eat because of this suit (deductibles with our insurance company, etc) by supporting CC. Or help us by joining as just a friend of CC. Or help us by spreading the news that the lawsuit is over.

And as one final word to the plaintiffs here -- a word I can utter because neither required nor asked: As CEO of Creative Commons, I apologize for any trouble that confusion about our licenses might have created. We thought the meaning was clear. We work hard to make this as clear as we can. We will work harder.

As you'll see in this video, there has been important progress in making Wikipedia compatible with the world of Creative Commons licensed work. But we should be very precise about this extremely good news: As Jimmy announces, the Wikimedia Foundation Board has agreed with a proposal made by the Free Software Foundation that will permit Wikipedia (and other such wikis) to relicense under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

That is very different from saying that Wikipedia has relicensed under a CC license. The decision whether to take advantage of this freedom granted by the FSF when the FSF grants it will be a decision the Wikipedia community will have to make. We are very hopeful that the community will ratify this move to compatible freedoms. And if they do, we are looking forward to an extraordinary celebration.

Read the Wikimedia Foundation resolution here.

My endless thanks to everyone who has helped make this possible, from Richard Stallman and the FSF board, to the important leaders within the Wikipedia community who say yet another legal obstacle to freedom that they could remove.

iCommons is the group CC incubated and then have begun to spin out this year. Its aim is to build a common (but not CC owned) platform for digital freedom related issues (A2K, free software, open source software, free culture, free knowledge, activism, etc.). Its main annual event is a conference. The first year was Boston. The second, Brazil. Last year, Croatia. Next year Japan.

iCommons is having an auction to build support (and $$!, or actually €) for iCommons. Among the items auctioned is the (embarrassingly worn) black jacket I have worn while traveling about 500,000 miles over the last few years. Weird (but clean). Bid away!

Tama's is the latest winning Flickr photo in the CC Flickr contest. It nicely captures my obsessive focus these next 9 days.

We turn 5 on the 15th. We've got a long way to got to meet our target for the year. Ordinarily we'd have till the end of the year. But this year, I want to meet the target by December 15. We've all been working insanely hard to pull this (and a list of amazing announcements) together. I want to be able to let the staff go back to life on December 16. And I want to have sometime to explain to my 4 year old just how reindeer fly.

So please, if you haven't, support us now. If you have, support us again. If you've got any really good dirt on someone, blackmail them now. And, as a special (if corrupt) bonus: If you donate $100 or more, I'll send a free DVD of my first corruption lecture. Just send an email to corrupt_lessig@pobox.com after you make your donation with an address, and off it will go.

We're in the final four days of CC's push to complete the CC fundraising campaign by Saturday. Last week we learned that Sun had doubled its contribution from last year. On Friday, our local hero, Tim O'Reilly, doubled his contribution from last year. And today we learned that Microsoft has also doubled its contribution from last year.

Doublemint yours today. Or singlemint if you've not given before. And if we can push a few more into the bucket, then we call can go back to work!

Flickr: fumi:

So as you know, this weekend CC celebrated its fifth birthday. In parties in Beijing, Berlin, Manila, Seoul, Belgrade, Brisbane, New York, Bangalore, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, thousands of CC supporters got together to remember the last five years, and get a peek of the next five. (Flickr stream).

I was in San Francisco at an extraordinary event at which Gilberto Gil and his son, Bem, and DJ Spooky performed. During my talk, I made a bunch of announcements. The key points were these:

1. Current TV will start integrating CC licenses into their citizen created content system.
   
2. CC0: On January 15, we will release a beta protocol to support a new tool, "CC0." CC0 will enable two things: (1) a simple, machine readable way to mark work with either a waiver of rights, or an assertion that no rights attach to a particular work, and (2) a simple way to sign that waiver/assertion. The protocol is intended to support use cases where the desire is that no rights attach to some work. E.g., databases in Europe (where the database rights muck up research), or material in the open education movement. Simultaneously with the announcement, Science Commons released its "Open Access Data Protocol," which implements CC0 to support freeing data.
   
3. Legal Commons (beta): Taking inspiration from the liberator and manumitter of government documents and legal cases, Carl Malamud, Creative Commons will enter into a joint venture with public.resource.org to collect and make available machine readable copies of government documents and law. Carl and I have committed to freeing all federal case law by the end of 2008. Importantly, this effort will not set up competing systems to the emerging ecology of great free law services (Cornell's LII, or Columbia's Altlaw.org). We instead will help gather and make available the resources those services use to provide their amazing service. So look for a tarball of all federal cases by the end of 2008, in parsable and usable plain text.
   
4. CC+: This protocol enables a simple click through ability to get rights or permissions beyond those provided by a CC license. So, e.g., a Flickr photo licensed under a BY-NC license could have a simple click through to some agent to provide commercial rights for that photo. We announced with a bunch of partners already. But really key was:
   
5. Yahoo announced it was baking CC+ "into the system" of Yahoo, making it possible for any Yahoo service to offer content using the CC+ infrastructure.
   
6. The Annual Campaign, this year with a $500,000 target, has exceeded its target by almost $40,000. This includes $50,000 contributions from Sun and Microsoft, and a $20,000 contribution from Tim O'Reilly.
   
7. [5x5] Challenge: After Hewlett issued a challenge to find 5 funders to promise 5 years of support at $500,000 a year, we announced pledges to match the commitment: The Hewlett Foundation, Omidyar Network, an (so far) anonymous European trust, Google/Mozilla/Red Hat (3-1-1), and amazingly, our board which promised to personally commit to either raise or contribute $500k/year. This means we've got core funding for 5 more years, and the first time I could breathe easily in more than 5 years.

   Stay tuned for more on each. But suffice: it was an amazing night.

ASCAP's essay, "Common Understanding: 10 Things Every Music Creator Should Know About Creative Commons Licensing" nicely highlights some important considerations that any musician should review before using a CC license. Unfortunately, however, it also continues some common misunderstandings about Creative Commons. I've reprinted, and responded, to these in the extended entry below. But before the details, there is one important fact of agreement to keep in view, and one important disagreement:

We certainly agree with ASCAP that "music creators should fully understand the terms to which they are agreeing and the implications down the line." That applies to CC licenses as much as to a recording contract. And we're as keen as anyone to make sure that understanding is there.

But it is not the case that CC asserts that "artists should give up all or some of their rights" -- if by that ASCAP means either that we believe giving up "all or some of their rights" always benefits an author or artists, or that, benefit notwithstanding, an artist should sacrifice his or her rights for the common good. Neither is correct. We know that sometimes, freer access helps. We provide tools to make it easier for artists to enable freer access. We also believe that when making creative work freely available doesn't hurt, and sometimes helps, the culture is benefited by choosing freedom rather than licensing lawyers. And finally, we believe that some forms of creative work -- e.g., the work of scientists, or governments -- should be freely available. But that normative claim is far from the work we do with the authors or artists that ASCAP deals with. Our business with respect to them is not to exhort them to charity. Artists and authors have it bad enough without a bunch of nerdy lawyer-types trying to pile on more guilt.

Now to the end of correcting some misunderstandings, the corrections of what ASCAP has said:

As we enter the final hours of the Support Creative Commons campaign (and here in California, we still have 9 hours left, so feel free to join in), we've exceeded our goal by almost 20%. I'm grateful to all for the support, especially the support coming just now. This has been a fantastic year.

After a productive and valuable conversation with my publisher, Random House, they've agreed to permit The Future of Ideas to be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. You can download the book for free here, or above.

This means all four of my books are now CC licensed. Code (v1) was licensed under a BY-SA license; so too, Code (v2). And Free Culture and now The Future of Ideas are licensed under BY-NC licenses.

I am particularly glad that The Future of Ideas is now freely licensed. That book hit the stores 2 weeks after September 11. I'm glad it now has a chance to flow a bit more freely.

Thanks to Random House (and Basic Books, and Penguin) for being open to this experiment. I hope we'll have some useful data to report about its effect.

Amazingly great CC news: Nine Inch Nails' latest album has been released under a Creative Commons license.

The iCommons iSummit in iSopporo is accepting submissions for ideas for panels, etc.

A favorite ccKorea photo, by ph1337 at Flickr

Just returning (actually, late for the plane) from ccKorea's "1st International Conference." The trip was an extraordinary rush of the happiest and saddest thoughts.

Happiest: to see how this local organization has grown. This conference was 100% locally funded and organized. There were hundreds who showed up to listen to talks about local CC artists, and talk about CC in education and in business. The key organizing of the event came from an army of CC volunteers -- ranging from high schoolers to professors in local universities. And the organization has been led and inspired by key members of the Korean bar, as well as a Korean judge. Korea is the perfect example of how CC can flourish on its own internationally. And it is rare that I get so inspired that I agree to go embarrass myself at karaoke, but that's in fact what the ccKorea team did (and no, there are no recordings).

Saddest: It finally hit me last night as Karaoke was winding down that I was in fact moving on from all this. I've spent much of the last 5 years flinging myself to over 40 countries to celebrate the launch of CC locally, and to other CC International events. My new work will mean I can't do this as much. My new focus is right for me, and for CC. But not having the chance to watch this kid grow as closely as I have so far is a big and sad loss.

Thank you, ccKorea, for making this sad recognition as happy as it could be. (And thank you for sparing the world a recording of the karaoke).

Here's the latest CC newsletter. It is extraordinarily beautiful and well done.

A great interview by Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman of Gilberto Gil.

Here's a talk I gave at the iCommons Summit in Sapporo Japan on July 30, 2008. Nothing new to readers here, but reframed a bit for the context.

So for non-lawgeeks, this won't seem important. But trust me, this is huge.

I am very proud to report today that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (THE "IP" court in the US) has upheld a free (ok, they call them "open source") copyright license, explicitly pointing to the work of Creative Commons and others. (The specific license at issue was the Artistic License.) This is a very important victory, and I am very very happy that the Stanford Center for Internet and Society played a key role in securing it. Congratulations especially to Chris Ridder and Anthony Falzone at the Center.

In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you're simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses. Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license.

Important clarity and certainty by a critically important US Court.

A FreeSoul by Joi

Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, has joined the Creative Commons board. News at CC.

Very cool news this morning: the latest version of Picasa Web Albums now, like Flickr, supports Creative Commons licenses.

Trust: Reaching The 100 Million Missing Voters, originally released in 2004 as a collection of essays, has been re-released online under a CC BY-NC license, by (my friend) the author, Farai Chideya, is credited and it is for non-commercial purposes.

You can download the first chapters here, with more to follow as the election continues.

Jesse Dylan (director of the extraordinary "Yes We Can" video) has made a film about Creative Commons. It is released today, the first day of our annual campaign.

The Free Software Foundation has released the GNU Free Document License version 1.3. Section 11 of that license now (essentially) permits certain wikis to be relicensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (v3.0) license, so long as the relicensing is completed by August 1, 2009. That means, the Wikipedia community now has the choice to relicense Wikipedia under a Creative Commons license. (Here's the FAQ for the amendment.)

It would be hard to overstate the importance of this change to the Free Culture community. A fundamental flaw in the Free Culture Movement to date is that its most important element -- Wikipedia -- is licensed in a way that makes it incompatible with an enormous range of other content in the Free Culture Movement. One solution to this, of course, would be for everything to move to the FDL. But that license was crafted initially for manuals, and there were a number of technical reasons why it would not work well (and in some cases, at all) for certain important kinds of culture.

This change would now permit interoperability among Free Culture projects, just as the dominance of the GNU GPL enables interoperability among Free Software projects. It thus eliminates an unnecessary and unproductive hinderance to the spread and growth of Free Culture.

Richard Stallman deserves enormous credit for enabling this change to occur. There were some who said RMS would never permit Wikipedia to be relicensed, as it is one of the crown jewels in his movement for freedom. And so it is: like the GNU/Linux operation system, which his movement made possible, Wikipedia was made possible by the architecture of freedom the FDL enabled. One could well understand a lesser man finding any number of excuses for blocking the change.

But here's what Richard said in 2002 in a different context:

"If we don’t want to live in a jungle, we must change our attitudes. We must start sending the message that a good citizen is one who cooperates when appropriate...."

Add "good citizen" to the list of praise for this founder of contemporary freedom.

From the CC Blog:

The ever innovative Brooklyn-based singer songwriter Jonathan Coulton has teamed up with Creative Commons to release his greatest hits compilation “JoCo Looks Back” on a 1gb custom Creative Commons jump drive to help support our 2008 campaign. If that weren’t enough, JoCo and CC have also included all of the unmixed audio tracks for every song on the drive. That’s over 700mb of JoCo thing-a-week goodness. Since all of JoCo’s music is released under our Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, this is an incredible opportunity for the public to remix and reuse his fantastic music. Song files are in 320kbps MP3 and unmixed audio tracks are in 256 VBR MP3.

We’ll be offering the drives exclusively at our $50 dollar donation level (and above) until December 31st. Also included are a CreativeCommons.net account, an OpenID identity, and a 2008 campaign sticker.

Jonathan also wrote a wonderful commoner letter speaking on how he, as a musician, uses Creative Commons to support himself and his career. Read it here.

The letter is just about the most moving CC writing I've seen.

Chris Messina's got a fantastic post about YouTube and Creative Commons. As it is CC licensed, I've reproduced it here:

Why YouTube should support Creative Commons now

I was in Miami last week to meet with my fellow screeners from the Knight News Challenge and Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson, two vlogger friends whom I met through coworking, started talking about content licensing, specifically as related to President-Elect Barack Obama’s weekly address, which, if things go according to plan, will continue to be broadcast on YouTube.

The question came up: what license should Barack Obama use for his content? This, in turn, revealed a more fundamental question: why doesn’t YouTube let you pick a license for the work that you upload (and must, given the terms of the site, own the rights to in the first place)? And if this omission isn’t intentional (that is, no one decided against such a feature, it just hasn’t bubbled up in the priority queue yet), then what can be done to facilitate the adoption of Creative Commons on the site?

To date, few video sharing sites, save Blip.tv and Flickr (even if they only deal with long photos), have actually embraced Creative Commons to any appreciable degree. Ironically, of all sites, YouTube seems the most likely candidate to adopt Creative Commons, given its rampant remix and republish culture (a culture which continues to vex major movie studies and other fastidious copyright owners).

One might make the argument that, considering the history of illegally shared copyrighted material on YouTube, enabling Creative Commons would simply lead to people mislicensing work that they don’t own… but I think that’s a strawman argument that falls down in practice for a number of reasons:

• First of all, all sites that enable the use of CC licenses offer the scheme as opt-in, defaulting to the traditional all rights reserved use of copyright. Enabling the choice of Creative Commons wouldn’t necessarily affect this default.
• Second, unauthorized sharing of content or digital media under any license is still illegal, whether the relicensed work is licensed under Creative Commons or copyright.
• Third, YouTube, and any other media sharing site, bears some responsibility for the content published on their site, and, regardless of license, reserves the right to remove any material that fails to comply completely with its Terms of Service.
• Fourth, the choice of a Creative Commons license is usually a deliberate act (going back to my first point) intended to convey an intention. The value of this intention — specifically, to enable the lawful reuse and republishing of content or media by others without prior per-instance consent — is a net positive to the health of a social ecosystem insomuch as this choice enables a specific form of freedom: that is, the freedom to give away one’s work under certain, less-restrictive stipulations than the law allows, to aid in establishing a positive culture of sharing and creativity (as we’ve seen on Flickr, SoundCloud and CC Mixter).

Preventing people from choosing a more liberal license conceivably restricts expression, insomuch as it restricts an “efficient, content-enriching value chain” from forming within a legal framework. Or, because all material is currently licensed under the most restrictive regime on YouTube, every re-use of a portion of media must therefore be licensed on a per-instance basis, considerably impeding the legal reuse of other people’s work.

Now, I want to point out something interesting here… as specifically related to both this moment in time and about government ownership of media. A recently released report from the GAO on Energy Efficiency carried with it the following statement on copyright:

This is a work of the U.S. government and is not subject to copyright protection in the United States. The published product may be reproduced and distributed in its entirety without further permission from GAO. However, because this work may contain copyrighted images or other material, permission from the copyright holder may be necessary if you wish to reproduce this material separately.

Though it can’t simply put this work into the public domain because of the potential copyrighted materials embedded therein, this statement is about as close as you can get for an assembled work produced by the government.

Now consider that Obama’s weekly “radio address” is self-contained media, not contingent upon the use or reuse of any other copyrighted work. It bears considering what license (if any) should apply (keeping in mind that the government is funded by tax-payer dollars). If not the public domain, under what license should Obama’s weekly addresses be shared? Certainly not all rights reserved! — unfortunately, YouTube offers no other option and thus, regardless of what Obama or the Change.gov folks would prefer, they’re stuck with a single, monolithic licensing scheme.

Interestingly, Google, YouTube’s owner, has supported Creative Commons in the past, notably with their collaboration with Radiohead on the House of Cards open source initiative and with the licensing of the Summer of Code documentation (Yahoo has a similar project with Flickr’s hosting of the Library of Congress’ photo archive under a liberal license).

I think that it’s critical for YouTube to adopt the Creative Commons licensing scheme now, as Barack Obama begins to use the site for his weekly address, because of the powerful signal it would send, in the context of what I imagine will be a steady increase and importance of the use of social media and web video by government agencies.

Don Norman recently wrote an essay on the importance of social signifiers, and I think it underscores my point as to why this issue is pressing now. In contrast to the popular concept of “affordances” in design and design thinking, Norman writes:

A “signifier” is some sort of indicator, some signal in the physical or social world that can be interpreted meaningfully. Signifiers signify critical information, even if the signifier itself is an accidental byproduct of the world. Social signifiers are those that are relevant to social usages. Some social indicators simply are the unintended but informative result of the behavior of others. . . . I call any physically perceivable cue a signifier, whether it is incidental or deliberate. A social signifier is one that is either created or interpreted by people or society, signifying social activity or appropriate social behavior.

The “appropriate social behavior”, or behavior that I think Obama should model in his weekly podcasts is that of open and free licensing, introducing the world of YouTube viewers to an alternative form of licensing, that would enable them to better understand and signal to others their intent and desire to share, and to have their creative works reused, without the need to ask for permission first.

For Obama media to be offered under a CC license (with the licensed embedded in the media itself) would signal his seriousness about embracing openness, transparency and the nature of discourse on the web. It would also signify a shift towards the type of collaboration typified by Web 2.0 social sites, enabling a modern dialectic relationship between the citizenry and its government.

I believe that now is the time for this change to happen, and for YouTube to prioritize the choice of Creative Commons licensing for the entire YouTube community.

From the Creative Commons blog:

As previously announced, we’re running a questionnaire on understanding “NonCommercial” use. The questionnaire runs through December 7. It takes 15-25 minutes to complete.

Click here to start the questionnaire.

Your input is greatly appreciated. CC CEO Joi Ito explains:

“The study has direct relevance to Creative Commons’ mission of providing free, flexible copyright licenses that are easy to understand and simple to use,” said Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito. “The NC term is a popular option for creators choosing a Creative Commons license, and that tells us the term meets a need. However, as exponentially increasing numbers of works are made available under CC licenses, we want to provide additional information for creators about the contexts in which the NC term may further or impede their intentions with respect to the works they choose to share, and we want to make sure that users clearly understand those intentions. We expect the study findings will help us do a better job of explaining the licenses and to improve them, where possible. We also hope the findings, which will be made publicly available, will contribute to better understanding of some of the complexities of digital distribution of content.”

You can also help by sending your friends and colleagues to the questionnaire.

Andy Oram has a fantastically compelling piece about why it is important to support Creative Commons.

Let's keep the momentum going, and [make] sure they can continue to lay the groundwork for a public domain that becomes increasingly important for innovation in a tight economy and for political engagement in a newly aroused community-minded public.

Joi Ito's new book is now available, Free Souls. The book is an amazingly beautiful (since Joi's the artist) and smart (since Joi knows the subjects) collection of photographs of many souls in the worlds Joi knows. All of the images are freely licensed (CC-BY) and all have signed model releases. So these are souls Joi has set free. As Joi's site puts it, "A celebration of all the people who are willing to share."

Still time to order for Christmas...

So here's an update on the Remix COLBERT/lessig project.

As I first reported, after the event, I was sent some very cool remixes. They're available in my first blog entry about the show.

Then ccMixter -- Creative Commons fantastic remix site, that allows you to track who remixed what -- launched a remix thread. You can see those here.

Then this morning I saw the link to the IndabaMusic site, which is running a contest around the clip. There are now about 20 remixes available, and more than 100 in the works. You can see those here.

All of the remixes in the ccMixter/IndabaMusic domains are CC licensed. The source, again, is my segment (the portion of the Colbert Report in which I am a joint copyright owner.) As that is CC-BY, anyone is free for any purpose (save endorsement purposes) to use it as you wish.

Freeing the source, for others to build upon. Read about Al Jazeera's decision in Fred's post for the CC blog:

Fred Benenson, January 13th, 2009

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.
There’s more information over at Al Jazeera’s CC repository, and in our press release. You can also add the Al Jazeera repository to your Miro feeds by clicking here.

Looks like novelist Mark Helprin is back. You might remember that in 1997, Helprin published an oped in the New York Times praising, as Peter Jaszi put it, perpetual copyright terms "on the installment plan." (Helprin insists he doesn't support perpetual terms; he just likes extending terms now to assure that grandchildren get the benefit of an authors work.) At the time, I invited the lessig-wiki community to pen a response. And amazing even to me, an extraordinary response they penned.

NPR retells the story today because apparently Helprin has a book which will be released on the 28th -- "Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto." (Note: if you buy Helprin's book from that link, Creative Commons will get the money.) The NPR page includes an interview with me (in my flu-ridden, 102 degree fever state, I'm terrified to listen to it again). But I am eager to read the book, and even more eager to read the review on the wiki.

Creative Commons is hiring a software engineer after the amazing Asheesh Laroia is moving on to some very cool (and maybe secret so I won't say more) project out East. If you can code for good, we pay some. More information here.

Exactly two years ago today, the New York Times published an op-ed about copyright by a novelist. The piece caused something of a digital riot. As we learn now from his book, Digital Barbarism (HarperCollins 2009) (note: if you buy from that link, Creative Commons gets the referral fee), Mark Helprin was at the time completely ignorant about the hornet's nest he was about to kick. For him, the op-ed was a professional rapprochement with the New York Times, a chance to make things right once again (though why they were then wrong is a story left mysteriously (and thankfully) out of the book).

(Read the rest of this insanely long review in the extended entry. You can download a better formatted PDF here.)

This is fabulously cool: iFixit has built a teardown platform. I've used the site many times to take apart Mac's I've needed to fix. But those instructions were iFixit prepared. They've now enabled anyone to build a teardown ("the act or process of disassembling") spec for any product. The site offers the structure and advice for building great teardowns. It then hosts and supports feedback. It is a fantastic example of a "hybrid," as REMIX defines the term -- and all submissions are CC-BY-NC-SA.