creative commons

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

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

YouTube & Creative Commons

YouTube has collaborated with Creative Commons to allow users to test the ability of users to upload & download video’s under Creative Commons licenses. Obviously users will be able to download the movies and be able to follow the licensing terms. Read more about this on the YouTube and Creative Commons blogs.

Posted on by mklang

On the joy of reuse

Mike Linksvayer has written a post on the Creative Commons blog on the joy of having other people find and reuse material. And I agree. So ok I am a hobby photographer and like so many of us I take good and bad pictures and post them online. Well to be fair a large group of hobby photographers take brilliant photographs and post them online.

The fun part is that lots of my photographs have been used to illustrate stuff online on blogs (sweet things to say & your monkey called), discussion forums, encyclopedia (construmatica) and even as a title photo for a group on library thing. Some don’t get the whole attribution thing but most do and it is really a kick looking up photo’s that I have taken and finding them somewhere unexpected – sometimes on sites in languages I don’t understand.

For me it’s not about the mass recognition (well ok I admit it would be fun) but it’s about the everyday use all over the place that gives my work with the camera an extra kick.

Posted on by mklang

File Sharing and Cannibalization

Fred Benenson comments the Nine Inch Nails Ghosts I-IV album over at the Creative Commons blog. The album is a great example that tears apart the arguments put forward by many “content” industry know-it-alls.

The argument, often repeated, is that putting material online will destroy all sales and therefore profits. There are several examples of books making great sales even after the content has been made available for free online. But thick academic books have been seen as a strange exception to the rule. In a recent discussion with a Swedish publisher they included the condition that making material available online only could work in English books – the Swedish market was too small to cope.

But books are not the only successful free content. The Nine Inch Nails Ghosts I-IV album is available online via file sharing networks – the entire content was licensed via Creative Commons license (BY-NC-SA) which allowed users to download it legally and many, many did so. But the fascinating thing is that Ghosts I-IV is ranked the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon’s MP3 store.

NIN Best Selling MP3 AlbumNIN’s Creative Commons licensed Ghosts I-IV has been making lots of headlines these days.

First, there’s the critical acclaim and two Grammy nominations, which testify to the work’s strength as a musical piece. But what has got us really excited is how well the album has done with music fans. Aside from generating over $1.6 million in revenue for NIN in its first week, and hitting #1 on Billboard’s Electronic charts, Last.fm has the album ranked as the 4th-most-listened to album of the year, with over 5,222,525 scrobbles.

The natural question is why fans bother buying files that were identical to the ones on the file sharing networks? According to Fred explanations vary from the convenience and ease of use of NIN and Amazon’s MP3 stores to the desire of fans to support the music and career of musicians they like.

The point is that “the next time someone tries to convince you that releasing music under CC will cannibalize digital sales, remember that Ghosts I-IV broke that rule, and point them here.”

Posted on by mklang

Important changes to license

In what is in the “sounds boring but is incredibly important and influential” category of news: The Free Software Foundation has released the GNU Free Document License version 1.3.

One of the main important changes is in Section 11 which now enables wikis to be relicensed under the from the earlier GNU Free Document License to the more flexible Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (v3.0) license. The condition is that such relicensing is completed by August 1, 2009.

That means, the Wikipedia community now has the choice to relicense Wikipedia under a Creative Commons license. Check out the FAQ for this change to the license.

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

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

Posted on by mklang

FSCONS

So now that FSCONS is finally here it is a great time to sit down, lean back and enjoy. Creative Commons held a workshop this morning but since then I have just enjoyed listening to the speakers. After lunch the speakers I chose to listen to were (are) Johan Söderberg A Conflict Perspective on Hacking, Denis Jaromil Rojo Freedom of Creation and Eva Hemmungs Wirtén Digital Commons throughout history.

The last speaker of the day will be Oscar Swartz who will give a keynote The End of Free Communications?

As you can see this is a very interesting day…

There are lots of pictures from the conference here!

Posted on by mklang

Three more trains before FSCONS

Sitting on a train on my way home from Malmö. Tomorrow is going to be back and forth to Stockholm before the cool weekend conference FSCONS. For those of you who have not been paying attention this a bit of their blurb:

FSCONS 2008 is the first among many Free Society conferences that bridges the gap between free software and cultural freedom. Co-arranged by Free Software Foundation Europe, Creative Commons and Wikimedia Sverige, FSCONS 2008 is already a landmark event in bringing the different movements working for digital freedom together.

But seriously check out the schedule – the speakers promise to make this a special event. If you are in the area you should seriously consider showing up.

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Open Access & Scientific Publication in Malmö

Tomorrow I am off to Malmö to give a copyright & Creative Commons presentation at a seminar on Open Access and Scientific Publication. This should be an interesting event (not because I am there) because the speakers are an interesting group concerned with increasing accessiblity to scientific publication. Judging from the amount of registered participants it should be a good meeting. I am looking forward to the trip.

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Case studies

One thing that often surprises me is the fascination with big numbers. I think I first noticed this when I began working with Creative Commons and reporters wanted to have numbers: in particular they wanted to know how many “things” were licensed under a Creative Commons license. For several years I answered “more than 50 million” copyrightable items were licensed and the reporters were happy – they had a big quote. Actually 50 million is nothing, peanuts and it’s also irrelevant.

Big numbers are of no practical use. They are mental popcorn, in the end unfulfilling.

That’s why I was happy to see that CC launched a case study wiki some time ago:

The Case Study Wiki chronicles past, present and future success stories of CC. The goal is to create a community-powered system for qualitatively measuring the impact of Creative Commons around the world. All are encouraged to add interesting, innovative, or noteworthy uses of Creative Commons licenses.

Simply the list of CC licensed books made bookmarking the site worthwile. Like all book browsing I ended downloading:

Philipp Lenssen 55 ways to have fun with google

Christian Siefkes From Exchange to Contributions

Marleen Wynants & Jan Cornelis (eds) How Open is the Future? Economic, Social & Cultural Scenarios
inspired by Free & Open-Source Software

Gustavo Cardoso The Media in the Network Society

It’s free and gratis: What’s not to like?

Posted on by mklang