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CC Newsletter — Issue No. 11
Share, Reuse, Remix —
Legally.
N E W S L E T T E R
http://creativecommons.org Issue No. 11 February 2009
A lex R ob er t s. “M elis sa
Reeder.” CC-BY 3.0
Dear Creative Commoner,
CC Newsletter — Issue No. 11
As we head into a new year, all of us here at CC look forward to the
new opportunities, projects, and milestones that lie ahead, just as we look
forward to working more closely with you, our community of supporters,
advocates, and friends. As you will read in the following news updates,
there’s a lot going on in the world of CC. We wrapped up 2008 with an
immensely successful fundraising campaign, meeting and exceeding our
goal by raising a grand total of $525,383.73. We are humbled that so many
individual and corporate supporters rallied behind our cause, especially in
this troubled economic time, and we owe our success to each and every one
of you. We hope you’ll continue to give our work meaning by joining with
us in building and advocating participatory culture.
Each newsletter we produce is also available in beautifully designed PDF
format, thanks to our CC Philippines team. We’re honored to have had
2 such stunning renditions of our newsletters over the past year, and we look
forward to CC Philippines’ continued artistry.
Be sure to check out this and past month’s newsletters:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CCNewsletter
Melissa Reeder
Development Manager
This newsletter is licensed
under http://creativecom-
mons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ —
please share and remix!
CC News in Arts & Culture
CC birthday celebration a global and TV stations across the world with
success! acknowledgment to Al Jazeera, marking
the first time that video footage produced
Last December, Creative Commoners by a news broadcaster is released under
around the world honored CC’s six the CC-BY 3.0 license, which allows for
exceptional years with 14 birthday both commercial and non-commercial
celebrations that included parties, contests, use. You can access the repository online
salons, art and music installations, at http://cc.aljazeera.net.
photography, and more. Our community
is vast and growing, and we are delighted David Bollier’s book, Viral Spiral,
that CC’s birthday has become an annual available under a Creative Commons
opportunity to celebrate participatory license
culture, innovation, the Commons, and
most importantly the community that has Public Knowledge cofounder David 3
sprung up around them. Bollier’s new book Viral Spiral, published
by The New Press, is not only available
as a free Creative Commons (BY-NC)
download, but it will likely establish itself
as a definitive guide for those seeking to
CC Newsletter — Issue No. 11
understand and discover the key players
and concepts in the digital commons.
If you are looking for a book that both
serves as an introduction to and argues
for the ideals behind a digital commons,
look no further. You can download the
book at http://www.viralspiral.cc/ or
purchase a hard copy at Amazon and
Al Jazeera announces launch of free other bookstores.
footage under Creative Commons
license
On January 13, 2009, Al Jazeera Network
announced the world’s first repository of
broadcast-quality video footage released
under the Creative Commons 3.0
Attribution (CC-BY 3.0) license. Select Al
Jazeera video footage will be available for
free to download, share, remix, subtitle
and eventually rebroadcast by users
Nine Inch Nails’ CC-licensed album and Joi Ito, which were all released as
a best-seller CC-licensed podcasts over the course of
the series.
NIN’s CC-licensed album, Ghosts I-IV,
was the best-selling MP3 album of 2008 Follow the latest CC news on CC
on Amazon.com, giving further proof Blog, Twitter, and Identi.ca
CC Newsletter — Issue No. 11
that CC licenses, can help spur greater
awareness, popularity, and financial With more and more CC success stories
success within the arts and culture world. and innovative projects popping up
This was great news for CC, since NIN’s across the globe every day, it has become
story has garnered a lot of buzz in many difficult to keep up with all of them. The
online communities. Creative Commons blog is the best place
for headline stories about all the latest
Obama-Biden transition site under news within the world of the Commons.
a Creative Commons license You can visit or subscribe to our Weblog
at http://creativecommons.org/weblog.
As many of you may have been aware, For news bites in 140 characters or less,
Change.gov, the official Web site of CC has begun actively microblogging
President Obama’s transition team, on Twitter and Identi.ca and both have
has been using a Creative Commons proven to be great mouthpieces for CC
Attribution license (CC-BY). Even more news. With over 1000 followers, these
4 exciting was the news that the new sites have helped strengthen CC’s online
Whitehouse.gov launched February community, and we invite you to tune in.
20, 2009 with a copyright policy that Links are here: http://creativecommons.
stipulates all third party content is licensed org/weblog/entry/10841
under CC By. This is a fantastic validation
of the importance of CC licenses and Growing a community of active CC
the commons, and we look forward to users
more widespread acceptance of CC
licenses and participatory culture in 2009 Heading into 2009, the culture arm of
and beyond. CC will continue to develop its community
outreach to active CC users. As more
Creative Commons/GOOD Magazine of our licenses spread far and wide,
collaboration the more possibilities open up for for
collaboration and creativity. If you’re an
As part of the GOOD December series active CC license user and have a project
hosted by GOOD Magazine in Los you want to let us know about, please
Angeles from December 5 to December get in touch with our Outreach Manager,
19, 2008, a live installation of Into Fred Benenson whom you can reach at
Infinity, the CC-licensed art and music fred@creativecommons.org.
project co-produced by dublab and CC,
was featured at GOOD’s new community
space on Melrose Avenue. Creative
Director Eric Steuer conducted interviews
with Jimmy Wales, Chris Hughes, Chris
Dibona, Caterina Fake, Curt Smith,
CC International
CCi and Wikimedia Germany now in Public discussion continues for Jordan’s
shared office space license draft, the first in Arabic which, in
addition to Al Jazeera’s Creative Commons
CCi is now housed in a shared repository, further demonstrates CC’s
workspace with Wikimedia Germany exciting developments in the Middle East.
in Berlin-Schöneberg. The move builds
upon existing collaborations with local Anyone is welcome to join in the public
Wikimedia projects and the hope of discussions (English re-translations of all
continued support and unified efforts, drafts are provided):
especially as Wikimedia/Wikipedia move
along in their discussion of releasing wiki Czech Republic:
content under a CC Attribution Share- http://mailman-new.greennet.org.uk/
Alike license (CC-BY-SA 3.0). mailman/listinfo/cc-czech
South Caucasus:
5
Spain’s Version 3.0 goes live http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/
cc-south-caucasus/
Creative Commons Spain and Catalonia, Jordan:
led by Ignasi Labastida i Juan, has http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/
successfully completed its versioning of the cc-jo/
CC Newsletter — Issue No. 11
ported Creative Commons licensing suite
to Version 3.0. The six standard Creative Australian census is now under
Commons licenses are now legally and Creative Commons license
linguistically adapted to Spanish law
and available in Castilian, Catalan, As of December 2008, the Australian
and Basque, with a Galician translation Bureau of Statistics released all of the
coming soon. content on its Web site (except logos
and other trademarked content) under
Czech Republic, South Caucasus, a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5
Jordan: licenses in public Australia license. ABS conducts the annual
discussion Australian census and is the holder of
all official Australian statistical data, so
The draft of CC BY-NC-SA 3.0, adapted their acceptance of CC licenses is truly a
to Czech law, is now in public discussion, milestone for Creative Commons, CCi,
thanks to the CC Czech team, led by and Creative Commons Australia.
Marek Tichy, Lukáš Gruber, and Petr
Jansa, who have been working with CCi
to port the CC licensing suite to Czech’s
copyright law.
Legal experts in the South Caucasus are
also making major strides in the Creative
Commons license porting process, with
the completion of license drafts from
Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia.
Regional stakeholders are now publicly
discussing the three drafts on the CC
South Caucasus mailing list.
Science Commons
Ensuring access to research output This video was launched in conjunction
— the Research Funding Addendum with a letter of support from Richard
Bookman, the Vice Provost for Research
This past December, Science Commons and Executive Dean for Research and
released its new industry-standard Research Training at the University of
CC Newsletter — Issue No. 11
Research Funding Addendum to Miami. Our thanks to Jesse Dylan,
members of the funding community for Professor Bookman, and the broader CC
their comments as we move forward community for their ongoing support.
in the design process. This Addendum
brings together many of the standards, SEED coins John Wilbanks a ‘Game
policy recommendations, best practices, Changer’ for Science
and models of scientific collaboration http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/
identified by Science Commons and puts archives/2008/11/13/seed-coins-
them into a form that can be implemented wilbanks-a-game-changer-for-science/
as part of any research grant agreement.
SEED Magazine has identified John
You can find the Funder Addendum on Wilbanks (Vice President of Creative
our new Foundation Resource page at Commons, Science) as a “Game
http://sciencecommons.org/resources/ Changer” for science for his work as the
funder/. There you can access our videos, head of Science Commons. The piece
6 background information, quarterly funder is part of their “Revolutionary Minds”
dispatches and more. series, where they profile a chosen few
for their advances in a certain area. In
Supporting the Commons: Jesse the video and accompanying text, John
Dylan and Richard Bookman describes the reasoning behind our
work and why making the web work
In December, as part of Creative for science is important for the world of
Commons’ annual fundraising campaign, scientific research.
we released Science Commons’ first
informational video. The video was John joins a group of all-stars, from Carl
directed by renowned director Jesse Dylan, Bergstrom (creator of the Eigenfactor)
the director of the Emmy- award winning to Ilaria Capua (a viroligist known for
“Yes We Can” Barack Obama campaign her avian flu research - especially in
video with musical artist will.i.am from the making the sequence available to the
Black Eyed Peas. The video can be seen public via GenBank.) Congratulations to
on the front of sciencecommons.org. all featured!
“I believe Science Commons represents The latest from the Data Project
the true aspiration of the web, and I
wanted to tell their story,” Dylan said. Numerous barriers to the use of scientific
“They’ve changed the way we think about data stand in the way of the progress on
exploration and discovery; the important problems such as the search for cures to
and innovative ideas need to be shared. disease. These barriers are often as much
I believe it’s vital to revolutionizing technical as they are legal and social. The
science in the future. I hope this is just the Science Commons Data Project works with
beginning of our collaboration.” scientists struggling with data access and
data integration challenges helping them resources provided by the projects that
with technical problems and community have signed up to the committee.
building, and to understand and anticipate
technical and policy needs. Seven leaders in e-Science and the
Semantic Web from the US, UK, and
In recent months we’ve started working Canada have committed to the effort.
with the NIH-sponsored Immunity Portal
(ImmPort, http://www.immport.org/) Representing significant progress on
on methods to integrate (“mash up”) another standards front, the World Wide
immunology related data resources for Web Consortium’s (W3C) OWL Working
use by scientists studying autoimmune Group recently announced a move to “last
disease. Techniques and resources call” for a set of technical specifications
developed while working with ImmPort for version 2 of OWL, an extension of the
will contribute to the development of W3C’s OWL Web Ontology Language. 7
the Neurocommons as well — it is OWL serves as a standard in the ontology
thought the immune system is one of the community and the new documents are on
important players in neurological disease. track to becoming W3C recommendations.
In a second project, initiated in January This is a tremendous accomplishment
2009, we are working with a consortium in the ontology community, and Science
CC Newsletter — Issue No. 11
of infectious disease researchers (http:// Commons’s Alan Ruttenberg played a
www.infectiousdiseaseontology.org/ critical role in orchestrating it. The expected
Consortium.html) to establish standards issue date for these recommendations will
and workflow to organize and exploit be shortly after the comment period closes
knowledge around infectious disease. The on January 23.
aim is to liberate scientific knowledge from
the scientific articles and clinical records We are also pleased to announce a
that are currently its primary carriers, technical advance that comes to us thanks
making it more accessible and valuable to our friends at OpenLink Software.
to both human and automated readers, The Neurocommons distribution, a set
and to show how computations using of information sources that have been
such open and structured knowledge “ported” to our prototype platform for data
can advance our understanding of integration, can now be provisioned for
disease mechanism. use in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
(EC2). Custom loads of the distribution
Our technical work includes both standards enable users to manage availability,
development and implementation. On selection and combination of content,
the standards front we are pleased to and resource utilization according to their
announce that Science Commons has own needs. This is another step toward
been midwife to the launch in January of converting data curation and integration
a “Shared Names” Steering Committee from an expensive, artisanal process to a
(http://sharedname.net/) charged systematic one making use of commodity
with nurturing communication about hardware and software.
biomedicine by creating standard names
(identifiers or “URIs”) for important objects
residing in public reference databases.
The names will help to link up research
ccLearn
“What status for open?” Paper potential users to adapt, combine, and
published recontribute your work back to the pool
of OER, thereby increasing quality of
We are very excited about the recent educational resources available for all to
publication of a year-long research share. For more info, see our first follow-up
CC Newsletter — Issue No. 11
endeavor entitled, “What status for open? document to the report “Supplement 1.0 —
An examination of the licensing policies Key considerations for licensing your open
of open educational organizations and educational resources on the Internet” at
projects.” The report, published last http://learn.creativecommons.org/
month and available at http://learn. cclearn-reports.
creativecommons.org/cclearn-reports,
asks, “What makes an educational Inside OER: An interview with the
resource “open”? Is it enough that authors of Collaborative Statistics
resources are available on the World Wide
Web free of charge, or does openness We recently interviewed Susan Dean
require something more?” and Barbara Illowsky, co-authors of the
popular statistics textbook, Collaborative
With the support of The William and Statistics. The textbook is widely used in
Flora Hewlett Foundation, ccLearn community colleges and was recently
surveyed the copyright licensing policies licensed under CC-BY. After being in use
8 of several hundred educational projects for 15 years, the two decided to obtain
or organizations on the Internet to assess the rights back from the publisher so that
whether these legal conditions limit they could make it freely available to
the usefulness of self-designated open students everywhere. Their path to open
resources from the user’s perspective. licensing is related in Inside OER (http://
learn.creativecommons.org/projects/
We won’t dive into the details of the report inside-oer), a ccLearn series featuring
here, but the basic gist of what we found interesting projects and people in open
is this: education. The Connexions project (Rice
University) now hosts the textbook on their
Most of the open educational resource site in modular form, so that you are free
(OER) sites in our study were licensed to use, improve, and remix any or all of
under a Creative Commons or other its components.
standard license. However, a good chunk
of these sites had terms of use that were
confusing or difficult to understand, and
a smaller chunk had crafted their own
licenses—-further complicating matters.
After months of digging through and
analyzing this stuff, we came up with some
recommendations for all of you out there
wanting to publish OER on the web.
In particular, we recommend that you
consider using the Creative Commons
Attribution-only license (CC-BY). Why?
Because it allows the most flexibility for
Open Ed Community Site
We are also in the midst of designing
a community site for open education
stake-holders and newbies. This site
will emphasize community — providing
a space for us to interact and share
ideas and resources that will help to
fuel the open education movement. We
are delighted to be working with White
Whale, a local consulting, design, and
development company, who has already
ccLearn Powering up for 2009 given us great feedback on the purpose
and structure of the site.
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We have many things in the pipeline for
2009. The research report (“What status learn.creativecommons.org
for open?”) was major, and that came
out just before the new year. We’re now We invite you to check back on the
working on follow-up documents and ccLearn site, or just subscribe to the blog!
CC Newsletter — Issue No. 11
media for exploring specific aspects of ccLearn’s vision is to make CC licensing
the report in more depth. For example, for educators (and students) accessible
interoperability of open educational and easy. We want people to know that
resources is a huge issue that needs to be education is free, and that open education
addressed, cutting across legal, technical, can be just as good, in fact better, than all
and social dimensions. Are OER machine- the stuff we currently pay an arm and a
readable so that teachers and students leg for. Don’t hesitate to contact us! Our
can find them easily via search engines? eyes and ears are constantly open to new
Currently, Creative Commons licenses ideas, for improvement or otherwise, and
are the only machine-readable licenses. for interesting collaborative opportunities.
This puts ccLearn in an excellent position Stop by and check it out:
to really engage and grapple with the http://learn.creativecommons.org/
interoperability issue, in addition to others
— like the pros and cons of the Share-
Alike licenses.
We’re also set to produce a white
paper and call to action for the
Universal Education Search, which has
been live in beta form for a while at
http://uesearch.creativecommons.org/
search/. Our report will detail what we
did, why we did it, and where we expect
it to go. We hope this transparency will
open up doors for future work — we want
to encourage others to take our ideas and
methods and move them forward.
creativecommons.org
We rely on our supporters to continue our work
enabling stories like those listed above. Check it out
Donate:
http://support.creativecommons.org/join
CC Store:
CC Newsletter — Issue No. 11
http://support.creativecommons.org/store
Subscribe to the CC Weblog:
http://bloglines.com/sub/http://creativecommons.
org/weblog/rss
http://google.com/reader/view/feed/http://
creativecommons.org/weblog/rss
http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=http://
creativecommons.org/weblog/rss
Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by
the generous support of organizations including the
Center for the Public Domain, the Omidyar Network,
The Rockefeller Foundation, The John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The William
and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as well as members of
the public.
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Creative Commons newsletters are also posted to the
CC Weblog. For back issues please visit
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CCNewsletter
Cover: “My Valentine” © 2008. Lairaja. Some Rights Reserved. Except when otherwise noted, this work
is licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ph/ This remixed image is
derived from CC Philippines’ “CC-PH Technical/Documentation / AUSL-ITC” http://www.flickr.com/
photos/ccphilippines/3119134071/; Mollyali’s “Long table full of revellers” http://flickr.com/photos/
mollyali/3114232639/ and “Garin, Ted, and CC swag” http://flickr.com/photos/mollyali/3114232775/;
Edna-photos’ “Sparklers and cake to celebrate” — all under CC-BY-NC 2.0; and Tvol / Timothy Vollmer’s
“CC 6th birthday party Washington DC” http://flickr.com/photos/sixteenmilesofstring/3114972778/,
Creativecommoners’ “P1070155” http://flickr.com/photos/creativecommons/3115599765/, and Renata
Avila’s “MBosque” http://flickr.com/photos/renata_a_pinto/3116223954/ — all under CC-BY 2.0.