Software Free

Nation Beat, a musical group that “bridges folkloric Brazilian rhythms with classic American roots music”, is set to release their sophomore album, Legends of the Preacher, on July 15th 2008. In conjunction with their release, Nation Beat and record label Modiba Productions are sponsoring an animation contest based on the band and their songs, with the animation assets released under a CC BY-NC license. From Nation Beat/Modiba Productions:

We’ve rolled out a few small changes to search.creativecommons.org:

• The part of the interface we control is now translatable, and has five languages enabled now — Afrikaans, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), English, and Japanese. You can suggest translations here.
• A screencast on using ccSearch with Firefox, including how to change your default search engine, and change it back.
• Run a default search when the user switches search tabs with no query entered.

You can browse and checkout the code (GPL licensed) from our source repository.

Further improvements we’re thinking about (patches welcome; see source info above):

Tune Rooms is “a music company that was created for Musicians and Music Fans alike” that aims to “enable music collaboration, promotion, and distribution on your terms.” This is accomplished through the use of ‘tune rooms’ in which users can upload different ideas, song sketches, and the like to the Tune Rooms webspace and allow others contribute to the song by adding new tracks. These ‘tune rooms’ are created in conjunction with musician profiles, blogs, and a variety of other Web 2.0 goodness.

In April I blogged about Open Source Lab’s fourth official workshop featuring ccLearn’s Executive Director, Ahrash Bissell. The Open Source Lab has now posted a video of the workshop at their blog. The workshop focuses on recent developments within open education, including but not limited to the impact of open licensing, as Ahrash emphasizes the grander scale of the movement.

The video, like all content on OSL’s blog, is licensed CC BY-NC-SA.

Two new releases of ccHost today, the remix-oriented media hosting software that drives ccMixter:

4.5, the final release from the 4.x tree. 4.0 was released March 6 last year.

5.0beta is the code that has been running on ccMixter for several months (5.0alpha was available in February.) The missing piece needed to make 5.0 final is updated administrator documentation.

The software is licensed under the GPL and downloadable from sourceforge or our source repository.

Building Commons and Community, a book written by the late Karl Linn on his experience “creating neighborhood spaces for communities and by communities”, has been released under a CC BY-NC-ND license. From New Village Press:

The Twitter Compilation Album is the end result of 34 different people meeting over Twitter and coming together to produce a CC-licensed album of unique and interesting music, all without meeting en masse in the same physical space. Most of those involved made music while others created pictures and provided server hosting. The end product has been released under a CC BY-NC-SA license and is absolute cat nip for those who are interested in online collaboration through new media tools.

Neuro Net Recordings is an online techno-music distribution project based out of Japan that houses over 80 pieces of CC BY-NC-ND licensed music at Archive.org. Founded in 1994, NNR has been pushing free and open licences in some form since before CC was even a blip of an idea and represents an interesting case study in regards to CC-licensed music distribution online. From jj1bdx:

NNR had the free online distribution policy from the beginning: NNR had the non-exclusive distibution rights of the music files in the various available formats on the Internet. It was quite similar to the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license, which means preserving the author’s credit, non-profit use only, and changes not allowed during redistribution.

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Source: Creative Commons » CC News

Apture is a new tool for bloggers that allows “content creators the power to find and incorporate relevant multimedia items directly into their pages” by adding links and small navigator windows to pages and posts automatically. Better understood in practice (see screenshot below), Apture seems poised to add incredible functionality to web pages that, while incorporating linking, remain relatively static. From The Washington Post (who have integrated Aprture’s technology into two of their blogs, The Fix and Celebrtitology):

Yesterday the U.S. House of Representatives passed the “PRO-IP Act” 410 to 11. The bill, if also passed by the U.S. Senate and made law, could create a “copyright czar” office and greatly expand copyright enforcement in and outside of the U.S.

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), along with other sponsors, is organizing the second annual Sparky Awards, “a contest that recognizes the best new short videos on the value of sharing and aims to broaden the discussion of access to scholarly research by inviting students to express their views creatively.”

Last year’s winners were announced earlier this year; the winners and runners up were all university students. Though this contest is ideal for college students with time on their hands, anyone can enter, as long as the video is:

CC Australia announces:

Registration is now officially open for the Creative Commons ‘Building an Australasian Commons’ Conference. The conference will be held on Tuesday 24^th June 2008 from 8.30am – 5pm at the State Library of Queensland, South Brisbane, and is proudly supported by Creative Commons Australia, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, and the State Library of Queensland.

It provides an opportunity for those interested in the free internet to come together to exchange ideas, information and inspiration. It brings together experts from Australasia to discuss the latest developments and implementations of Creative Commons in the region. It aims to be an open forum where anyone can voice their thoughts on issues relating to furthering the commons worldwide.

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Source: Creative Commons » CC News

Huh? Isn’t video on the web ubiquitous already?

Sort of. Video on the web today is seriously lacking when it comes to things like addressability (e.g., a standard way to link to a specific time segment or frame region), standard codecs, and metadata. All of these are really important if video (and other media types) are to fully take advantage of the web’s architecture — among other things making video more amenable to reuse — legally enabled by most CC licenses, but not exactly facilitated by today’s video-on-the-web technologies.

So Creative Commons is a supporter of the W3C’s Video on the Web Activity Proposal, appropriately subtitled as such:

Video on the Web is not just what you see — it’s what you can search, discover, create, distribute and manage.

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Source: Creative Commons » CC News

I hate to beat a dead horse, but the horse’s promoters provide a convenient excuse when they claim the dead horse is making a comeback. The horse in question of course is DRM (emphasis added):

“(Recently) I made a list of the 22 ways to sell music, and 20 of them still require DRM,” said David Hughes, who heads up the RIAA’s technology unit, during a panel discussion at the Digital Hollywood conference. “Any form of subscription service or limited play-per-view or advertising offer still requires DRM. So DRM is not dead.

CC using record label Magnatune just announced a DRM-free subscription service.

Jonathan Zittrain has recently released his new book, The Future of the Internet — And How To Stop It. In honor of this important work, CC has teamed up with the EFF and Stanford to hold an event for people to come hear him speak about his book and to meet others interested in and committed to openness in this digital age. Of course, refreshments will be served. If interested, please rsvp to the address below.

Details
When: Tomorrow, Friday, May 9th from 6-8pm
Where: Ritz Carlton, 600 Stockton St., San Francisco, CA
RSVP: