A more in-depth profile of the Blender Institute will be released in the forthcoming book Made with Creative Commons.

How did this film come together? What were its origins?

At the Blender Institute studio, we’ve been making CC BY-licensed films since 2007. The first short films we made were mostly crowdfunded via the pre-sale of DVDs that offered the film itself, along with all of the assets and software that someone would need to remake the entire film. This was a huge success… we’ve always used our productions—and the revenues we derive from them—to improve Blender, our open source 3D creation tool.

In 2014 we decided to drop this funding model. DVDs didn’t sell well anymore, nor is it very practical to use for data sets. Instead we began uploading everything we made to a website—all the films, all of the sources for them, and 100 hours of training materials we’d made over the past several years. This is what we call the Blender Cloud. For just $10 per month subscribers can get access to everything on the site under CC BY, and we use the subscription revenues to produce new content and film continuously.

Caminandes Llamigos was the third short film we produced thanks to Blender Cloud subscriptions. As usual, the goal with this project was to further improve Blender but also to have a large collection of CC BY content and tutorials to share with users online. People love funny films, and it’s a big inspiration to learn how to make them from the makers directly.

The Caminandes series is based on director Pablo Vazquez’ home country – Patagonia. Pablo loves funny crazy animals as well as short cartoons in the well known American ’50s tradition.

How long did it take to make? What was the process of making it happen?

Writing and storyboarding started in October of last year. Production started in November and lasted 3 months. In February, we spent a month wrapping up the project by producing additional content, including making-of materials, asset downloads, and tutorials.

Why do you choose the specific CC licenses you use for your projects?

We almost exclusively use CC BY and CC 0 for our works. Offering our films and their source materials under a noncommercial license was never something we considered, as doing so makes sharing content with serious artists and professionals impossible or confusing.

Open licenses are essential for sharing our films and their source material. CC BY and CC 0 make the asset collections usable for other projects. Also, for the kinds of training that we want to encourage, it’s essential to give students the right to build on top of our work in order to make new works, share those works, and show them in public.

What do you hope people will do with this film? How do you want them to interact with it?

Sharing is caring! As artists and makers, we want people to share our work so that lots of people see it. Past versions of  Caminandes were copied to the Disney Channel with big success! The Caminandes characters are becoming quite well known now, and people have started using them in unexpected ways. We are happy about this.

That said, looking back at 10 years of sharing animation film under CC, we are surprised that people haven’t been using the assets to create entirely new episodes or versions—and certainly not in the quality and quantity we did. You might think that “giving it all away” would cause you to lose everything because your great artwork now can be duplicated and used by everyone. Instead, we learned something else. Even when you share everything, including all your original sources, it still takes a lot of talent and skill and time and budget to make this sort of work. There’s no value for us in enforcing strict copyright limitations on the work.

The post Blender Institute’s Ton Roosendaal on open licensing and artistic success appeared first on Creative Commons.

The 22-year-old started taking photos in 2009 during Rand Paul’s Senate campaign, uploading all of his photos under a CC BY-SA license. Since then, he has accumulated over 1 million photo credits and 1.2 million views on his page. In addition to political photography, Skidmore has been the official photographer for a variety of events and publications, uploading over 45,000 photos to his Flickr account.

Skidmore answered questions over email from CC’s Eric Steuer, discussing his success as a photographer, passion for politics, and how the CC license fuels his work.

What was the first photo you made of a politician? What were the circumstances surrounding that shot?

The first ever political event I attended was an event in Louisville, Kentucky in November 2009, when I attended a healthcare town hall being hosted by the U.S. Senate campaign of then-ophthalmologist Rand Paul. I was a big supporter of his dad, Ron Paul, in his 2008 campaign, and at the time I lived in Indiana, so I was only a couple hours from Kentucky. Over the course of that year I decided to start documenting his campaign, mostly as a supporter, and attended a couple events a month. I uploaded all of these photos onto Flickr under a Creative Commons license for people to use.

Rand Paul at Volunteer Phone Bank, Manchester, NH, Photo by Gage Skidmore CC-BY-SA 2.0

How many political photos have you published since then? What is your typical process for getting these shots?

I’m not entirely sure on the exact amount. The two main things that I cover are politics and pop culture conventions like Comic Con. I’ve uploaded close to 45,000 photos, and most of them are probably politics related.

When did you decide to start using CC licenses to make your photos available to the world? And why did you make this decision?

I saw Creative Commons as a vehicle to help get my photos disseminated easily very early on. Through my involvement with projects like the Wikimedia Commons, I learned about Creative Commons licensing, and chose the license that I thought best fit my desire for my photos to be used in the proper manner. Attribution was very important to me, and still is.

Hillary Clinton with supporters, Photo by Gage Skidmore CC-BY-SA 2.0

Since then, your photos have been used in a variety of ways. Do you notice that they’re mostly used by media outlets? What other ways have you noticed people using your work?

My photos have been used by a lot of different websites, news sites, and sites like Wikipedia, and I’m very happy to see this. I really enjoy seeing my photos being used, especially if they comply with the CC-BY-SA license and attribute me.

Do people typically contact you to let you know they’ve used your work? Have there been any particularly interesting conversations (or stories or even commissions?) that have come out making your work available to the world?

I’ve had people email me just to make sure that I am attributed properly, or to ask permission to use my photos. I was involved with documenting the 2016 campaign, so I did have interactions with some of the campaigns who wanted to use my photos while also abiding by the photo license.
One misconception that a lot of people have asked me about is in regards to the main photo on Donald Trump’s website. It is one of my photos, and his campaign actually attributed me at the bottom of his website. Many people assumed from this that I was a supporter of his, or worked for him in some way, neither of which is true. The Trump campaign simply found my photo, used it on their website, and attributed me for my work.

Donald Trump Campaign Website Banner, Photo by Gage Skidmore CC-BY-SA 2.0

At CC, we’re specifically interested in how creators contribute to a culture of sharing and gratitude by making their work available under CC. What’s been your experience as someone who puts a lot of high value work out there under CC licenses? Do you find that people are grateful for your contributions?

I’ve had a great amount of positive reception from people thanking me for providing quality images of certain people over the years under a Creative Commons license. Wikimedia Commons is one such community that I believe truly embraces its contributors and tries to create a library of images that are Creative Commons or public domain. I’m very much glad to be a participant in this project.

Has the approach you employ helped create any opportunities that might not have been available to you otherwise?

Since I started I’ve had people recognize my name and actually get in contact with me to offer photography gigs, mostly in the Phoenix area where I live now. Getting my name out there helped people get a sense of my work, and that has translated into a lot of paid opportunities to be an official photographer for various events. Some of these include the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, Western Journalism, Conservative Review, Reason Magazine, the Mises Institute, Campaign for Liberty, the Iowa GOP, several different centers at Arizona State University, and some freelance work that has allowed me to photograph people like the President of the United States.

I’m always excited to see what presents itself day by day, and it really all goes back to my involvement with Creative Commons that first allowed me to get my name out there and break into a field that is constantly changing and evolving.

Bernie and Jane Sanders, Photo by Gage Skidmore CC by SA 2.0

The post Spotlight on Gage Skidmore, political photographer appeared first on Creative Commons.

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When the Open Courseware movement first started – its Big Bang probably took place in mid-June 2001, when Mellon Foundation president William G. Bowen, Hewlett Foundation’s president Paul Brest, and MIT president Charles M. Vest announced the initiative at MIT – our understanding of rights and licensing and the full range of our opportunities for accessing and sharing knowledge was more primitive than it is today. We didn’t yet know truly how to share knowledge online, nor did we know how to permit, license, and further facilitate the use, reuse, and remix of our content. It would be two years before Creative Commons licenses, also launched in 2001, would grace a million works. And it would be five years before Wikipedia, also founded in 2001, would publish its millionth English-language article.

Today, almost 15 years later, a new order of magnitude is required to calculate the extent of the commons. Wikipedia and its sister projects have seen more than 2.6 billion edits to date; now the online, open encyclopedia gains over 10 edits per second – 20,000 articles per month worldwide – and English Wikipedia alone averages 800 new articles posted per day. Creative Commons has more than a billion licenses in circulation. CC-licensed works were, according to CC, viewed online 136 billion times last year alone, and the growth in the use of this content worldwide, while still challenging to track, appears to be commensurate.

So how is it that today’s edition of open courseware – massive open online courses – don’t really intersect with the commons? Today there are thousands of hours of academy-produced video online – together representing the investment of tens of millions of dollars by universities and other cultural and educational institutions in online educational media. And, since 2001, major philanthropic foundations – Ford, Gates, Hewlett – and U.S. federal government agencies have accelerated open licensing mandates for their grantees. Yet most of the open courses and open courseware projects that universities are producing to date, and most of the ones that they are producing today, are far from truly open: far from being able to be welcomed by the keepers of the commons into the legally shareable universe, far from being licensed in ways that make them free. Open Courseware launched at MIT, where Richard Stallman, the visionary of free software and oft-cited inspiration behind Wikipedia and CC, keeps his office, yet most MOOCs, like most university video, lie outside the commons, and are destined to stay outside unless we do something.

The “Redefining Open” Project, part of a larger advocacy initiative on opening educational video that Intelligent Television is leading with core support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, explores why MOOCs are not open as the open in their name might suggest and puts forth suggestions about what might be done to help. Over the next three months the project will review the licensing frameworks for open courseware to date; analyze the rights anatomy of educational video; describe the state of educational media production and distribution in 2016; and address how production, distribution, archiving, and preservation processes might be changed to achieve greater openness and greater return on investment for many of the institutions funding MOOC development today. In October 2016 the project will present a series of next steps for MOOC producers to realize the promise that the founders of Open Courseware first envisioned 15 years ago.

About the author

Peter B. Kaufman is founder and executive producer of Intelligent Television in New York and former associate director of the Columbia University Center for Teaching and Learning. He served as conference co-chair of LEARNING WITH MOOCS II and is the author of, among other works, “Video on Wikipedia and the Open Web: A Guide for Cultural and Educational Institutions” for the Ford Foundation, The New Enlightenment: The Promise of Film and Video in the Digital Age, and, also with the support of the Hewlett Foundation, The Columbia Manual of Video Style.

The post Redefining Open: MOOCs and Online Courseware in the Age of Creative Commons and Wikipedia appeared first on Creative Commons.

Earlier this month, the fine folks of Creative Commons Japan hosted a beatmaking event at Bigakko, an innovative art education center in Tokyo. A quartet of up and coming Japanese electronic music producers—Madegg, Metome, Foodman (best name ever), and Canooooopy—were issued a challenge: Create brand new remixes of CC-licensed tracks found online. The musicians had exactly four hours to complete the challenge, from finding the CC-licensed source material to exporting their finished remixes.

The results turned out to be pretty fantastic, and are now available through the Creative Commons SoundCloud account. Most of the remixes and almost all of the source tracks that were used are licensed under CC BY and CC BY-SA, so there’s a lot here that you can not only listen to but also use for your own projects and remixes. Check ’em out:

Madegg, “Banana Man”

Metome, “Impro 2016l4l2”

食品まつりa.k.a Foodman, “Hey”

Canooooopy, “雲間に閃く集合知 [clouded souls of crowds]”

The post At Japanese Beatmaking Event, Producers Create CC Remixes in Just Four Hours appeared first on Creative Commons.

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The global maker movement is known for creative hacks, as well as for getting people of all ages excited about technology and how the world works. At the intersection of maker communities and social activism, we find remarkable projects like Open Source Ecology, WikiHouse, and the topic of this article: Appropedia.

Appropedia is not a specific effort to use technology for good, but rather a global community documenting collaborative solutions for sustainability, appropriate technology, poverty reduction, and permaculture. You can think of it as a “Wikipedia for sustainability” and, indeed, it uses similar underlying mechanics: the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License and the MediaWiki software, for starters.

Appropedia co-founder Lonny Grafman (sitting, right) at the Las Malvinas photovoltaic workshops, where participants become the teachers and install solar power for a public pharmacy. License: CC BY-SA

Lonny Grafman, an an instructor at Humboldt State University in Northern California, founded Appropedia in 2006. Today it has thousands of pages on topics as diverse as solar cookers, thermal curtains, and rainwater harvesting. It is available in eight languages, including the beginnings of a Kiswahili edition.

The wiki is a tool for communities of practice that are looking to achieve real-world impact. At Humboldt State, Grafman founded a program called Practivistas. “In the Practivistas program, we bring students from the US and other countries to live and work with students in another country, in communities of little resources,” Grafman explains.

Practivistas don’t approach communities with a predetermined problem or solution. Instead, projects like a classroom constructed using locally sourced materials and alternative building methods are planned and implemented together with local communities from start to finish. In this case, plastic bottles were used as one of the primary materials for the classroom walls.

A beach bag made from plastic waste as part of the Arroyo Norte waste plastic innovation project. License: CC BY-SA

Projects are documented in Appropedia so that other communities may benefit. Beyond Practivistas, students from courses at Humboldt and other universities contribute content to the wiki through what’s called service learning. Explains Grafman: “It’s this thing that sits between and hopefully a little bit above internship, which is about student learning, and volunteerism, which is about the target community getting needs met.”

Grafman argues that engaging students in building the commons is better for the students, too: “My experience is that students learn more. Even just by motivation. When you’re doing something real, that has real impacts, there’s just a lot more motivation to do it right.”

In addition to his work on Appropedia, Grafman is interested in ways to reduce humanity’s energy use. He co-founded a company, Nexi, which makes energy monitors for the home. It’s a for-profit, and parts of the tech will remain proprietary, while Nexi may contribute to a commons of open data about energy use: “The good news is that we really don’t have to be puritanical about anything as diverse solutions will actually build more resilience.”

Appropedia, meanwhile, is hiring an Executive Director, to make the sustainability commons itself sustainable in the long run. No matter what the future holds, as a repository of creative solutions for addressing the problems all around us, Appropedia has already demonstrated that an information commons can directly improve people’s lives.

You can learn more about the project’s goals, and read the full interview I conducted with Lonny Grafman on Passionate Voices.

Erik Moeller (@xirzon), PassionateVoices.org

The post World Without Waste? Appropedia and the Sustainability Commons appeared first on Creative Commons.

As an homage to his friend and creative collaborator, Barnbrook decided to take the “gift” concept to the next level. He released the artwork for Blackstar under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, so that it could be shared and remixed noncommercially by Bowie fans around the world.

We recently had the opportunity to talk to Barnbrook about choosing to make the Blackstar art available in this fashion. It was great to hear how much the notions of tribute and gratitude played into his decision to use a CC license for this project.

Blackstar by Barnbrook, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

What inspired you to offer the Blackstar art to the public for reuse and remix?

I felt a public, more “official” gesture was needed to empathize with the grief many people were suffering [as a result of David Bowie’s death]. I had seen a lot of tattoos and use of the artwork, so I wanted to give these people something to remember David by without them thinking they were using the artwork illegally or secretly in some way. I was as upset as they were, so the artwork was released in the positive spirit of sharing and understanding what they were going through.

People belittle collective public grief, which is a bit silly because a person can be the conduit of an ideology or philosophy of an age. I think [the grief] has been so enormous for David because he represented being who you wanted to be in a society where people are often not given the chance to do that. He gave hope and expression to many who didn’t fit in or who were not where they quite wanted to be, so when he was gone it was understandable that people felt a great sense of loss.

I also feel that music is very underrated in terms of importance in people’s lives. In an immediate sense it doesn’t help a war situation or save someone’s life, but it is very life affirming. It can help you through depression, express the moments of absolute joy, be a symbol of an age or philosophy. So again, it is understandable that you’d grieve when the person who expressed these things for you in the intangible form of music is no longer there to be part of your life.

I always felt that it was an incredible responsibility and privilege whenever I worked on David’s covers. So I understood that this would be an appropriate thing to do.

A portrait of Jonathan Barnbrook … by Cyberuly, CC BY 2.5

Why did you specifically choose a Creative Commons license to encourage people to share and remix the artwork?

It is a very well-thought-out, simple system that everybody knows and can understand. The licenses can be read in depth or understood simply on the website. It made it clear that people could use it in the way they wanted without affecting the commercial aspect of the album sales.

Was releasing the art in this way something you’d considered doing before Bowie’s death?

I talked about this with David before he died and he thought it was a great idea, although I couldn’t have imagined the sad circumstances under which I would eventually do it. It came from when the album The Next Day came out—the fans took the white square on the cover and used it in their own way. It was something which I didn’t calculate but it made me extremely happy that they wanted to use, respond, and be part of it too. I felt this needed to be thought of at a fundamental level for the release of Blackstar, that the old model of a record company releasing the record and copyrighting everything so fans could not react or add their own interpretation was wrong. It shouldn’t be such a one-sided experience and instead should show respect and understanding for those people who love the music. The music is still the property of the record company and that is not affected, this just means that people can have their own identification with the release and what Bowie meant to them. When he died I felt that it was even more important that we should do this, especially since a lot of people had specifically asked me for the artwork without any intention of making money from it.

Since I released the artwork I have received so many lovely messages thanking me for it and saying what it means to be able to use the artwork to remember David by. Really it has brought a tear to my eye each time I have read them.

Have you seen any interesting uses or remixes of the art yet?

People are incorporating the Ziggy Stardust stripe in with it, which I think is great. That is an amazing graphic and to feel that the Blackstar [art] is of equal meaning is an honor.

How an artist has affected your life is an intensely personal, unique experience. One of the reasons that we used the Creative Commons license allowing derivatives was because of this. It is important that people interpret [art] in their own way and that they feel free to do it. It is not something that should be dictated by me—I just created one of the components to do it.

And what kind of things do you hope people do with the art?

Quite simply: show their love and appreciation of David Bowie.

How did you first learn about Creative Commons licenses?

It has always been on my radar. It was one of the first prominent models of sharing creativity in a way that didn’t fit in with the existing models of “commercial or not commercial” for artworks. There needs to be a room to share which is above and beyond what is monetary value. Humanity is not built on money—it is built on the meaningful exchange between people.

How have openness and sharing influenced your work and creative process generally?

I think it has been fundamental to it. In addition to working in music, [my creative studio] has done a lot of activist work—and that is about ideas. The spreading of those ideas is fundamental to their success. We have made a lot of them free for people to use and we will be shortly be using Creative Commons again for artworks on our new website soon.

The post Jonathan Barnbrook on his CC-licensed art for David Bowie’s Blackstar appeared first on Creative Commons.

Creative Commons and Dublab have a long history of working together, and Dublab is behind a wide variety of amazing and inspiring CC-licensed music and visual art. Learn more by visiting Dublab’s website and reading about some of the projects Dublab and CC have collaborated on.

Below are the track listing and a SoundCloud widget for Dublab’s #cc10 mix. Download and share it!

[01] Carlos Niño & Miguel Atwood Ferguson – “8 Moons Blue”
[02] Nobukazu Takemura – (Unknown Title)
[03] Lucky Dragons – “13”
[04] Nite Jewel & Julia Holter – “What We See”
[05] Yoko K – “Into Infinity ‘Ear’ Loop #1”
[06] Golden Hits – “Pillowillow”
[07] Tujiko Go – “Into Infinity ‘Ear’ Loop #1”
[08] Yuk. & Teebs – “Estara”
[09] asonic garcia – “Endless Realm (Bun/Fumitake Tamura remix)”
[10] Dntel – “Guardian”
[11] Wake – “Duckbag”
[12] Javelin – “dublab decade jamz”
[13] DJ Lengua – “Waterbeat”
[14] Derrick Winston – “Jawhar”
[15] James Pants – “Tonight, By The Moonlight”
[16] Matthewdavid – “Jingle 3”
[17] Kentaro Iwaki – “Into Infinity ‘Ear’ Loop #5”
[18] Lucky Dragons – “Real Fire”
[19] High Places – (Unknown Title)
[20] Bradford Cox aka Atlas Sound – (Unknown Title)
[21] Feathers – “Eldritch”
[22] The Long Lost – “You Own Backyard”

The post Dublab Celebrates #cc10 with a New Music Mix appeared first on Creative Commons.

“It’s imperative that those who contribute true value in the communication of the results of research have their rights protected while promoting access as far as possible,” says Philip Campbell, Editor-in-Chief of Nature and Nature Publishing Group. “Creative Commons is a key contributor to that ethos, and I am delighted that we at Nature Publishing Group will be adding our support in this way.”

This builds on the announcement last week that NPG will make a donation to CC of $20 per APC for articles published in Scientific Reports, its newest open access publication. NPG has kick-started its wider support with a donation of $15,560 to CC’s current funding drive. This is equivalent to $20 per APC for all 778 open access papers published by NPG, from when it started offering open access publishing options to its authors in 2005, to the end of 2010.

“NPG is taking this step as part of our ongoing commitment to open access,” says Jason Wilde, Business Development Director at NPG. “We feel that it is important to support the legal framework behind open access, particularly given that we and many other publishers rely on the work of CC to license open access content.”

As of January 2011, NPG publishes 45 journals that have an open access option, or are entirely open access. Twenty are wholly owned by the publisher, and it is these journals that the CC agreement will apply to. For each APC paid on these journals, NPG will donate $20 to CC. NPG is currently in discussion with its academic and society partners, and with their agreement expects to expand the program to society-owned journals in the coming months.

“NPG’s commitment to making knowledge available to share and build upon is commendable all on its own – I’m thrilled that the company is taking the innovative next step of financially supporting Creative Commons’ work. CC’s tools make sharing easy and legal, and NPG’s support for what we do demonstrates that it is deeply dedicated to realizing the potential of open access.” commented Cathy Casserly, CEO, Creative Commons.

Authors of the research paper concerned will be eligible for complimentary membership of the CC network. Joining CC gives authors access to a network of other individuals who share a belief in the power of open systems to enhance innovation. Creating profiles on the CC network allows authors to expose their work to an international community of open access supporters and leading thinkers. To claim their membership, authors simply need to contact CC with the DOI of their article. This membership offer is retrospective, and open to all authors of every open access article published in NPG journals from 2005 to the end of 2010.

NPG now offers an open access option on 51% of its portfolio of 88 journals. In addition, NPG encourages self-archiving, in line with its license to publish, and offers a free manuscript deposition service to PubMed Central and UK PubMed Central on 43 titles.

About Nature Publishing Group (NPG):
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is a publisher of high impact scientific and medical information in print and online. NPG publishes journals, online databases and services across the life, physical, chemical and applied sciences and clinical medicine.

Focusing on the needs of scientists, Nature (founded in 1869) is the leading weekly, international scientific journal. In addition, for this audience, NPG publishes a range of Nature research journals and Nature Reviews journals, plus a range of prestigious academic journals including society-owned publications. Online, nature.com provides over 5 million visitors per month with access to NPG publications and online databases and services, including Nature News and NatureJobs plus access to Nature Network and Nature Education’s Scitable.com.

Scientific American is at the heart of NPG’s newly-formed consumer media division, meeting the needs of the general public. Founded in 1845, Scientific American is the oldest continuously published magazine in the US and the leading authoritative publication for science in the general media. Together with scientificamerican.com and 16 local language editions around the world it reaches over 3 million consumers and scientists. Other titles include Scientific American Mind and Spektrum der Wissenschaft in Germany.

Throughout all its businesses NPG is dedicated to serving the scientific and medical communities and the wider scientifically interested general public. Part of Macmillan Publishers Limited, NPG is a global company with principal offices in London, New York and Tokyo, and offices in cities worldwide including Boston, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Delhi, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Madrid, Barcelona, Munich, Heidelberg, Basingstoke, Melbourne, Paris, San Francisco, Seoul and Washington DC. For more information, please go to www.nature.com.

About Creative Commons (CC):
Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain. Through its free copyright licenses, Creative Commons offers authors, artists, scientists, and educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to enable a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by the generous support of organizations including the Center for the Public Domain, 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. For more information about Creative Commons, visit http://creativecommons.org.

The post Nature Publishing Group expands support for Creative Commons appeared first on Creative Commons.

Creative Commons licenses are copyright licenses – plain and simple. Period. CC licenses are legal tools that creators can use to offer certain usage rights to the public, while reserving other rights. Without copyright, these tools don’t work. Artists and record labels that want to make their music available to the public for certain uses, like noncommercial sharing or remixing, should consider using CC licenses. Artists and labels that want to reserve all of their copyright rights should absolutely not use CC licenses.

Many musicians, including acts like Nine Inch Nails, Beastie Boys, Youssou N’Dour, Tone, Curt Smith, David Byrne, Radiohead, Yunyu, Kristin Hersh, and Snoop Dogg, have used Creative Commons licenses to share with the public. These musicians aren’t looking to stop making money from their music. In fact, many of the artists who use CC licenses are also members of collecting societies, including ASCAP. That’s how we first heard about this smear campaign – many musicians that support Creative Commons received the email and forwarded it to us. Some of them even included a donation to Creative Commons.

If you are similarly angered by ASCAP’s deceptive tactics, I’m hoping that you can help us by donating to Creative Commons – and sending a message – at this critical time. We don’t have lobbyists on the payroll, but with your support we can continue working hard on behalf of creators and consumers alike.

Sincerely,
Eric Steuer
Creative Director, Creative Commons

* For background on ASCAP’s anti-Creative Commons fundraising campaign, see Boing Boing, Techdirt, ZeroPaid, and Wired.

The post Response to ASCAP's deceptive claims appeared first on Creative Commons.

Some very exciting news for authors, publishers, and readers: Today, Google launched a program to enable rightsholders to make their Creative Commons-licensed books available for the public to download, use, remix, and share via Google Books.

The new initiative makes it easy for participants in Google Books’ Partner Program to mark their books with one of the six Creative Commons licenses (or the CC0 waiver). This gives authors and publishers a simple way to articulate the permissions they have granted to the public through a CC license, while giving people a clear indication of the legal rights they have to CC-licensed works found through Google Books.

The Inside Google Books post announcing the initiative talks a bit about what this all means:

We’ve marked books that rightsholders have made available under a CC license with a matching logo on the book’s left hand navigation bar. People can download these books in their entirety and pass them along: to friends, classmates, teachers, and so on. And if the rightsholder has chosen to allow people to modify their work, readers can even create a mashup–say, translating the book into Esperanto, donning a black beret, and performing the whole thing to music on YouTube.

The project launched with a terrific starter collection of CC-licensed books that includes: 55 Ways to Have Fun with Google by Philipp Lenssen; Blown to Bits by Harold Abelson, Ken Ledeen, Harry R. Lewis; Bound by Law? by Keith Aoki, James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins; Code: Version 2 by Lawrence Lessig; Democratizing Innovation by Eric von Hippel; Federal Budget Deficits: America’s great consumption binge by Paul Courant; The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain; Little Brother by Cory Doctorow; and A World’s Fair for the Global Village by Carl Malamud.

Stay tuned for further announcements – as the project expands to include more authors and publishers, Google Books plans to add the ability for people to restrict searches to books they can share, use, and remix.

The post Google Books adds Creative Commons license options appeared first on Creative Commons.