Flickr has over 2 billion images – that’s a lot. If you type in the search term ”Göteborg” – my home town – suddenly you have the more manageable number of 66 804 hits. Of these 13 820 images are available under one of the six Creative Commons licenses which allow others to reuse the images.
The reason I know these numbers is that I have been doing some preparatory work for a project. I have looked through the 13 820 images and chosen 279 of them.
My short book on open licenses in Swedish Copyright – Copyleft: En guide om upphovsrätt och licenser på nätet is finished and it is online at the IIS, the organisation who commissioned the work. The book covers seven licenses and the Creative Commons system.
The licenses discussed/explained are the Free Art License 1.3, GNU Free Documentation License, the Sparc Author Addendum, the Ethymonics Free Music License, the Common Documentation License, the, the BSD Free Documentation License and the Open Game License.
I am happy that the work is done and I hope that it will serve to help the curious learn more about licensing.
Google has announced that it is enabling users to choose Creative Commons licenses in its Picasa Web Albums service. Users storing their photographs on Picasa can either license each photo individually or set a defualt license.
(via Creative Commons blog)
Finally! The Creative Commons team (Kalle and I) have spent two days drinking strong coffee, arguing and laughing in an effort to update the Swedish licenses from version 2.5 to 3.0. Now the license drafts are done and we have invited people, organisations and government bodies to read and comment on the work.
If any of you readers want to join in the bags of fun then feel free to surf in to www.creativecommons.se/drafts/
Right now I am looking forward to drinking a congratulatory beer or two. Since I am totally brain-drained and coffee-pickled.
Singapore has become the 47th jurisdiction to adapt and implement the Creative Commons licenses. Congratulations from the Swedish CC Team to the CC Singapore team, led by Associate Professor Samtani Anil & Assistant Professor Giorgios Chelioti at the Centre for Asia Pacific Technology Law & Policy.
Norway has launched its Creative Commons (CC Norway) licenses – Congratulations Norway!
The CC Norway team is headed by Project Leads Gisle Hannemyr and Peter Lenda, who with Haakon Flage Bratsberg, Thomas Gramstad, Tore Hoel, and Vebjørn Søndersrød, coordinated the license porting process with Creative Commons International and conducted public discussion with local and international legal experts. Check out the press release (in English and Norwegian).
The launch of the licenses will be celebrated on Friday, June 6th – which happens to be Sweden’s national day!