commons

Creative Commons v3

A bit late to blog about the obvious but at the same time it feels wrong not to blog about such a central event in the Creative Commons project. Anyway the news is (if you haven’t heard about it already) that CC now has released its latest versions of the license. Welcome to version 3.0.

The latest version of the Creative Commons licenses â?? Version 3.0 â?? are now available. To briefly recap what is different in this version of the licenses:

Separating the â??genericâ?? from the US license

As part of Version 3.0, we have spun off the â??genericâ?? license to be the CC US license and created a new generic license, now known as the â??unportedâ?? license. For more information about this change, see this more detailed explanation.

Harmonizing the treatment of moral rights & collecting society royalties

In Version 3.0, we are ensuring that all CC jurisdiction licenses and the CC unported license have consistent, express treatment of the issues of moral rights and collecting society royalties (subject to national differences). For more information about these changes, see this explanation of the moral rights harmonization and this explanation of the collecting society harmonization.

No Endorsement Language

That a person may not misuse the attribution requirement of a CC license to improperly assert or imply an association or relationship with the licensor or author, has been implicit in our licenses from the start. We have now decided to make this explicit in both the Legal Code and the Commons Deed to ensure that â?? as our licenses continue to grow and attract a large number of more prominent artists and companies â?? there will be no confusion for either the licensor or licensee about this issue. For a more detailed explanation, see here.

BY-SA â?? Compatibility Structure Now Included

The CC BY-SA 3.0 licenses will now include the ability for derivatives to be relicensed under a â??Creative Commons Compatible License,â?? which will be listed here. This structure realizes CCâ??s long-held objective of ensuring that there are no legal barriers to people being able to remix creativity in the way that flexible licenses are intended to enable. More information about this is provided here.

Clarifications Negotiated With Debian & MIT

Finally, Version 3.0 of the licenses include minor clarifications to the language of the licenses to take account of the concerns of Debian (more details here) and MIT (more details here).

As part of discussions with Debian, it was proposed to allow the release of CC-licensed works under DRM by licensees on certain conditions â?? what was known as the â??parallel distribution languageâ?? but this has not been included as part of Version 3.0 of the CC licenses.

Below is a list of CC blog posts about Version 3.0:

Getting to Version 3.0
Version 3.0 â?? Public Discussion Launched
Version 3.0 â?? Revised License Drafts
Version 3.0 â?? Itâ??s Happening & With BY-SA Compatibility Language Too

Posted on by mklang

Britannia Rules / Britannia Sucks

Creative Commons’ UK film competition “Mix & Mash” in association with Google UK invites short video submissions mixing and mashing digital content under the theme: Britannia Rules / Britannia Sucks .

Remixing digital content is the basis for this competition. Digital pictures, sound or films licensed through Creative Commons and Public Domain material need to be used. Entrants can use their creativity to remix the work of others with their own. The result will be a collage of original and re-used material.

Films will be made available online under a Creative Commons Noncommercial license. For terms and conditions, and more details go to:www.MixandMash.cc

Posted on by mklang

Incompatible Licenses

This morning a short question was posed on one of the Creative Commons mailing lists (cc-community).

I have a simple question. Why are all the Creative Commons licenses incompatible with the GPL?

This was an excellent little question and since then the mailing list has been busy sending in responses and thoughts. Since this is an open mailing list it is ok to quote one of the answers which I found very well written and helpful in explaining this important issue. The reply comes from Greg London and is as follows:

(broad brushstrokes follow.
Nit-pickers need not apply)

If you’re talking about converting
content between the CC-SA and GNU-GPL
licenses, then the problem is basically
a side effect of copyleft.

Copyleft licenses keep the content Free
by demanding that the content and any
derivatives are always available under
the same license as the original.

This prevents someone from putting more
restrictions on the work and taking a
version of Free content private.

Almost counter intuitively, copyleft
protects the content by disallowing
someone from removing restrictions on
the work. This could be abused by allowing
someone to first convert the content from
a copyleft license to a public domain license,
and then allowing the person to create
proprietary forks.

So, copyleft keeps the work Free by demanding
that the content and its derivatives must always
be held under the same license as the original.

Which means that if you have two copyleft
licenses, but they have different requirements,
they are incompatible. The GNU-GPL and CC-SA
licenses are both copyleft. But the GNU-GPL has
a source code requirement that the CC-SA does not.

If you took CC-SA content and converted it to
GNU-GPL, you would be adding a source code
requirement to the content that did not exist
before. And if you took GNU-GPL content and
converted it to CC-SA, you’d be removing the
source code requirement.

And since both say you can’t change the requirements,
converting between either license is disallowed.

The idea CC is apparently working on for making
licenses inter-operable is to put language into
the license that allows the content to be licensed
under the original license, or any license that is
deemed to be similar enough, for some fuzzy definition
of “enough”.

They already have something like this that makes sure
that, for example, the different language versions
of CC-SA are compatible with each other. The way I
understand it, they’re are going to try to use the
same approach to expand compatibility outside of the
CC-SA licenses.

Since no CC license has a “source code” requirement,
I don’t think any CC license will ever be directly
interchangable with GNU-GPL. But they are trying to
solve the problem of license proliferation by building
in a mechanism that will allow all the content to be
transferred to licenses that are deemed “close enough”.

I hope this helps.

You can join the list and/or read the archives.

Posted on by mklang

Long Long Day

Too many impressions and a long long day. Walked around and found a bookstore where I bought Amartya Senâ??s Identity and Violence â?? The Illusion of Destiny and an anthology edited by Thussu & Freedman entitled War and the Media – Reporting Conflict 24/7.

Then we went to the Indian Institute of Technology to be present at the Creative Commons India launch â?? Welcome! There were speeches by (among others) Joichi Ito & Lawrence Liang which was followed by dinner and conversation. Now itâ??s late and tomorrow is an early start.

Posted on by mklang

Train day 2

Yesterday included a six hour train ride from Stockholm and back again. The point was to go meet some people and organise my visa for the Indian trip next week. Today was another six hours on the train. This time it was off to Linköping to give a Creative Commons presentation. The journey was with Jonas �berg who was presenting the third draft of the GPLv3 which is about to be officially released in a matter of hours.

Interesting stuff and an enthusiastic audience made the brief stay in Linköping worthwhile. Unfortunately the last train home left at 8pm so we were pressed for time.

On the train home and I have just bugged Jonas to put his presentation online – download the pdf here.

Posted on by mklang

Search by Colour

Don’t you hate it when you have an image stuck in your mind? In particular a picture of a picture. Thanks to basic information overload, the internet, and not least, Flickr there are more images than I can imagine. Occasionally one of these images flashes past my screen and I think “nice” before moving along. Later I attempt to look for the picture and fail miserably.

I try retracing my steps, thinking where I had seen it, cursing my senility and realising the picture I need has gone forever (again!). The problem is, and I think of it as a problem, that there is no really good search tool for images. Now there is a partial solution to then problem.

The Flickr Color Selectr searches Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr by color. My problem is that after playing with it for a little while I realised that I will now see hundreds more cool images that, a few weeks later, I will never find…

Posted on by mklang

Torrent BBC

The BBC must be seen as being among the avant garde of television today. Not too long ago they opened up their archives under licenses similar to Creative Commons licenses (Look at the Creative Archive License Group). In doing this they were ahead of their time.

Now they have decided to make â??hundredsâ?? of episodes of BBC programmes via bittorrent.

By doing this the BBC once again show that they â??getâ?? technology. While in Sweden the term file-sharing is becoming synonymous with illegal action the BBCâ??s deal with Azareus shows that they can recognize a superior distribution system when they see one.

The new deal means that users of the software will be able to download high-quality versions of BBC programmes, including Red Dwarf, Doctor Who and the League of Gentleman. Classic series such as Fawlty Towers will also be available through a BBC “channel”. BBC News

Naturally the BBC is not into giving away these top titles (you didnâ??t think it would be that good â?? did you?) No, the titles will be protected by digital rights management software to prevent the programmes being traded illegally on the internet.

The BBC might carry the nickname Auntie Beeb but all I can say is that I wish my Swedish public service relatives were as creative.

(via Boing Boing)

Posted on by mklang

Snow!

Another trip to Stockholm. This time to meet with people from UR (utbildningsradion) public service. It was a good meeting and an interesting discussion on how public service television in Sweden can use Creative Commons licensing. After the meeting I had some time to kill so I walked around Stockholm and it started to snow. Finally! So far December has been dismally warm and wet so a little snow makes it feel more like Christmas, even if we will not get a white Christmas in Göteborg.

So now that I have seen snow I feel more disposed to the season – which is good considering I shall be buying the tree tomorrow… Everything else is already all in place (almost). Christmas in Sweden is pretty traditional: tree, presents and too much food. I am looking forward to it.

Posted on by mklang

License Validity – again

TechnoLlama wrote about a Spanish Creative Commons case:

A Spanish court in Pontevedra has ruled in favour of the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE) against a café named Direccion000. SGAE initiated action against the cafe to claim royalties for de public performance of music in the locale, while the owners claimed that they did not have to pay because they were only using â??free musicâ?? under Creative Commons licences.

The SGAE could show that the cafe was not entirely truthful in their claims. The music they were playing included that of members of the SGAE.

What is more interesting is that the court apparently commented on the CC licenses in the decision â??â?¦it is worth to point out that the document presented by the defendants-appellants as a licence for free use of music does not constitute anything other than a mere informative leaflet about its own content, lacking any form of signature, and therefore bereft of legal value whatsoeverâ??.

OK – let me come clean from the beginning: I am not a Spanish lawyer. But I find it incredibly hard to believe that the Spanish legal position on licenses & contracts is such that they need to be completed with the formality of the signature to be valid.

Additionally I would also like the court to explain what the value of a “informative leaflet” is under contract law.

OH NOT AGAIN… Where did these people go to law school?
The Creative Commons licensing system does not really require the status of a license to be able to survive. Under legal principles the fact that the creator has stated in an “informative leaflet” that she will not enforce her rights under copyright law is enough for me to follow the permissions and conditions stated in the Creative Commons documentation.

If I follow the documentation and the creator attempts to sue me for copyright violation (therefore  claiming that the Creative Commons is not a license) the courts would naturally understand my actions as being carried out with permission.

An analogy. Supposing a theme park which charges admission puts up a sign that admission on 1 January 2007 is free. If they (despite their previous idea) attempted to sue all visitors who did not pay admission on this date for trespassing the courts would hardly support the claims of the theme park.

Go and read:

Charles Fried Contract as Promise (We enforce contracts because they are promises â?? and we have a moral obligation to keep our promises).

Posted on by mklang

Creative Commons Photo Contest on Flickr

Creative Commons announced the first CC Swag Photo Contest on Flickr. The contest runs through December 18, 2006 (see information and rules).

The CC Swag photo contest challenges people to creatively photograph CC T-shirts, buttons, stickers, and other promotional items (all available at CCâ??s online store). and enter their photos by uploading them to the Flickr group CCSwagcontest06.

Two winners, as chosen by CC staff, will have their photos used on CC’ informational postcards, which will be distributed internationally to promote CC and the winning photographers. Winners will receive 100 copies of the postcard that features their photo. The winners will also be able to choose a CC board member to record a personalized outgoing voicemail announcement. List of Creative Commons board members.

Posted on by mklang