commons

The Art of Community

One of the best things about the internet is the amount of cool material is available online. Now The Art of Community by Jono Bacon is available under a Creative Commons license. Here is some information from his website http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/

When I started work on The Art of Community I was really keen that it should be a body of work that all communities have access to. My passion behind the book was to provide a solid guide to building, energizing and enabling pro-active, productive and enjoyable communities. I wanted to write a book that covered the major areas of community leadership, distilling a set of best practices and experiences, and illustrated by countless stories, anecdotes and tales.

But to give this book real value, I was keen to ensure the book could be freely accessed and shared. I wanted to not only break down the financial barrier to the information, but also enable communities to share it to have the content be as useful as possible in the scenarios, opportunities and problems that face them. To make this happen O’Reilly needed to be on board to allow the book to be freely copied and shared, in an era in which these very freedoms threaten the publishing world.

Even if you don’t buy it, I would be hugely grateful that if you like it, please go and review it on Amazon. This is a hugely contribution. Thanks!

You can download the The Art of Community here.

Posted on by mklang

Google Books goes Creative Commons

Some interesting news from the Creative Commons blog

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.

Posted on by mklang

Code Rush

The documentary Code Rush from 2000 is about the open-sourcing of the Netscape code base and the beginning of the Mozilla project. Here is a comment from IMDB

Watch this film and you will get to see the things that a college computer science course could never prepare you for: having to sleep at the office for days in order to meet a deadline, alienation from family, caffeine addiction, having one’s release blocked by intellectual property concerns, and other cold realities of Silicon Valley. If you’re thinking about getting a career in software engineering or software project management, Code Rush is a must-see.

This documentary also gives insight into a few of the major milestones in the history of the software industry, such as the opening of the Netscape source code, which is code named “Mozilla”. If it weren’t for this release, we wouldn’t have Mozilla Firefox, one of the most popular Internet browsing solutions today. The footage also covers one of the most notable company acquisitions of that time period.

Code Rush is now released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. There is also a dedicated homepage for the film, with links to stream or download the film in various formats.

Posted on by mklang

Remix available for download

Lawrence Lessigs book Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy is now  is now Creative Commons licensed and ready for download from the Bloomsbury Academic page.

remix_cover_l.jpg

‘Lessig’s proposals for revising copyright are compelling, because they rethink intellectual property rights without abandoning them.’
Briefly Noted The New Yorker

‘Lessig… has written a splendid combative manifesto – pungent, witty and persuasive.’
Financial Times

‘… Lessig is surely right that digital culture requires governance that is more subtle and ecological, judging a balance of forces between commerce and community, than precise and draconian.’
Books of the Week, The Independent

‘Prof Lessig is formidably qualified…his latest book, REMIX will enhance his cult status on the web.’ The Guardian

To hear Lawrence Lessig talk about his book Remix you can listen now to the NPR interview (37 min 51 sec)

Posted on by mklang

Wikipedia to vote on change from GNU FDL to CC BY-SA

Sorry for the horrible abbreviations in the title!

Wikipedia is in the process of deciding to go from using the GNU Free Documentation License to using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as its primary content license. One of the reasons for this move is that the GNU Free Documentation License is less flexible to use for wikipedia. More information from the Creative Commons blog:

A community vote is now underway, hopefully one of the final steps in the process the migration of Wikipedia (actually Wikipedias, as each language is its own site, and also other Wikimedia Foundation sites) to using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as its primary content license.

This migration would be a huge boost for the free culture movement, and for Wikipedia and Creative Commons — until the migration happens there is an unnecessary licensing barrier between the most important free culture project (Wikipedia of course, currently under the Free Documentation License, intended for software documentation) and most other free culture projects and individual creators, which use the aforementioned CC BY-SA license.

To qualify to vote, one must have made 25 edits to a Wikimedia site prior to March 15. Make sure you’re logged in to the project on which you qualify, and you should see a site notice at the top of each page that looks like the image below (red outline added around notice).

licensing update site notice

Click on “vote now” and you’ll be taken to the voting site.

For background on the migration process, see Wikimedia’s licensing update article and the following series of posts on the Creative Commons blog:

Here’s a great “propaganda poster”, original created by Brianna Laugher (cited a number of times on this blog), licensed under CC BY. See her post, Vote YES for licensing sanity!

Indeed, please go vote yes to unify the free culture movement!

Vote YES! For licensing sanity!

Posted on by mklang

More images in the commons

The Creative Commons blog writes about 250,000 images recently donated to Wikimedia Commons, a sister project of Wikipedia.

The images, part of the German Photo Collection at Saxony’s State and University Library (SLUB), are being uploaded with corresponding captions and metadata. Afterward, volunteers will link the photos, all available under Germany’s ported CC BY-SA 3.0 license or in the public domain, to personal identification data and relevant Wikipedia articles. The collection depicts scenes from German history and daily life.

As a bonus for the donating library, the metadata supplied by the German Photo Collection will be expanded and annotated by Wikipedia users, and the results will be seeded back into the collection’s database.

The donation marks the first step in a collaboration between SLUB and Wikimedia Germany e.V., the pioneering Wikimedia chapter who faciliated a similar 100,000-image-strong cooperation with the German Federal Archives last December.

Creative Commons license Creative Commons Attribution Creative Commons Share Alike

This file is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Germany License.

Posted on by mklang

Museums are doing it

Today I came across a notice that the Powerhouse Museum is adopting the attribution, non-commercial, no-derivatives Creative Commons license (for the material it owns)

This licence is used on some parts of our website. Examples are our own photography in the Photo of the Day blog and also for children’s activities on our Play at Powerhouse website. This licence means that you can republish this material for any non-commercial purpose as long as you give attribution back to the Powerhouse Museum as the creator and that you do not modify the work in any way. A more detailed explanation of this licence is available from Creative Commons.

And not long ago I found that the Brooklyn Museum was also using the same license.

This is in addition to the great collection of museums and institutions which have chosen to join the Flickr Commons.

The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.

Among the 23 organisations in the Flickr Commons is the Swedish National Heritage Board which has begun putting photographs online. How about this photo from the small fishing town of Lysekil

Photograph: People in old Lysekil by Carl Curman (c:a 1870) uploaded RÄA

Posted on by mklang

Open Database License beta

The Open Database License is

The Open Database Licence (ODbL) is a licence agreement intended to allow you to freely share, modify, and use this Database while maintaining this same freedom for others. Many databases are covered by copyright, and therefore this document licenses these rights. Some jurisdictions, mainly in Europe, have specific rights that cover databases, and so the ODbL addresses these rights, too. Finally, the ODbL is also an agreement in contract for you to act in certain ways in return for accessing this Database. (okfn blog)

Here is a clip from the latest Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter (No. 10) concerning the developments in the Open Database License:

BETA VERSION OF THE OPEN DATABASE LICENSE (ODBL)
================================================

As we announced in January the OKF has adopted the Open Data Commons
project. As part of the project Jordan Hatcher has been working on a
new Open Database License (ODbL) – which is now in beta.

Beta version of the Open Database Licence (ODbL)
http://blog.okfn.org/2009/03/16/beta-version-of-open-database-licence-odbl/

Open Database Licence (ODbL)
http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/

Comments on the license can be made here http://www.co-ment.net/text/844/

Posted on by mklang

Growth of license use

On his blog Rasmus has a very cool motto that warns the reader not to be too impressed with large numbers:

Multiplication can produce powerful numbers.

But it is a difficult motto to follow since we live in a world where measurability is all important. We want to know, we need to know what is bigger, smaller, cheaper, richer, higher, etc so we measure stuff – constantly. To measure also implies that we compare. Are we getting bigger, better or not?

So every now and then someone asks the inevitable question: but how big is Creative Commons? and I am reminded of the motto above. One of the problems is that we need to measure, we want to measure and yet large numbers lose their meaning and become vague: in Swedish their is a wonderful word for this vagueness ogreppbar which translates as ungripable.

Anyway for those of use that still want to see the numbers Creative Commons has a page on Metrics which attempts to present the data. For example as the first bar chart shows there are now clearly over 130 million copyrighted objects licensed under Creative Commons licenses (personally I think this figure is a bit low…)

The next natural question (for me) is who are these people? That is tricky. But we may gain som insights by looking at the jurisdictional spread of Creative Commons licenses. Keep in mind that their is no limitation for a Frenchman to choose to use a Swedish license while residing in Thailand. Also – the web doesn’t really care about physical geography.

Lager image here

The numbers are fun and interesting. They are indicative of something but remember “Multiplication can produce powerful numbers” you cannot find absolut truth in numbers.

Posted on by mklang

Lessig asks for help in Fairy defence

Lessig is asking for help in the Shepard Fairy/AP case. He writes on his blog:

As mentioned, the Fair Use Project at Stanford’s CIS is representing Shepard Fairey in his suit against the AP. To that end, we’d be grateful for some net-based knowledge. How many photos are there “like” the beautiful photograph that Mannie Garcia took (the one on the left; the one on the right is a CC licensed photo taken by Steve Jurvetson)? Can you send any examples to shep_use@pobox.com?

Also, please send any favorite examples of photos used as visual references for other works of art. We lawyers don’t know much, but we can learn pretty quickly.

Posted on by mklang