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Creative Commons Newsletter No.11

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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.
                                                                                                                   9
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://
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                                       http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=http://
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                                       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.
10
                                       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.