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Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation that assists authors and creators who want to voluntarily share their work, by providing free copyright licences and tools, so that others may take full and legal advantage of the Internet's unprecedented wealth of science, knowledge and culture.
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Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation founded in 2001 in the US with the dedicated aim of making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.
Creative Commons provides free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, and so on.
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With a Creative Commons licence, you keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit — and only on the conditions you specify here.
Get a Creative Commons licence for your work or find out more about the Creative Commons licences.
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Dan Bull (@itsdanbull), the British Geek rapper who found fame by using YouTube for distributing his rap videos such as SOPA Cabana, has achieved chart success by commercially releasing his new track ‘Sharing is Caring,’ whilst also making it available for free legal downloads. You can either buy it from ITunes, Amazon et al or legally download a copy for free.
Other British musicians such as Curt Smith, solo artist and founder member of Tears for Fears have used Creative Commons licensing for their music. Musicians often choose to use a non-commercial licence for easy legal sharing online but prohibit commercial use. All CC licences require attribution to be provided. Curt Smith used a CC Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike licence.
Interestingly Dan Bull chose to use CC0 which waives his copyright to ‘Sharing is Caring’ therefore requiring no attribution, and imposes no restrictions on how that copyrighted work may be reused.
This is a guest post by @mhawksey. Martin Hawksey is a Learning Technology Advisor for the JISC funded Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards (JISC CETIS). The majority of his work is focused on supporting the UK’s Open Educational Resources Programme. So you’ve decided to ‘share your knowledge and creativity with the world’ licensing your blog content using Creative Commons. Having chosen the license for your needs, next you need to mark your work so that other know how they can remix or reuse your content. The Creative Commons licensing tool helps you select the license you need but also generates the code for your website. Visitors to your website will see how your work is licensed, but what about people who read your content using different ways? What about people who subscribe to your content using RSS feeds (unsure about RSS? Here it is explained in plain English). There are a couple of ways to include your CC licenses in your RSS feed. You can, for example, manually copy and paste your license code to the end of every blog post, or your blogging platform may include options to insert a custom footnote which could include the license link.
This is a guest post by @mhawksey. Martin Hawksey is a Learning Technology Advisor for the JISC funded Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards (JISC CETIS). The majority of his work is focused on supporting the UK’s Open Educational Resources Programme.
So you’ve decided to ‘share your knowledge and creativity with the world’ licensing your blog content using Creative Commons. Having chosen the license for your needs, next you need to mark your work so that other know how they can remix or reuse your content. The Creative Commons licensing tool helps you select the license you need but also generates the code for your website.
Visitors to your website will see how your work is licensed, but what about people who read your content using different ways? What about people who subscribe to your content using RSS feeds (unsure about RSS? Here it is explained in plain English). There are a couple of ways to include your CC licenses in your RSS feed. You can, for example, manually copy and paste your license code to the end of every blog post, or your blogging platform may include options to insert a custom footnote which could include the license link.
This is a guest post by @patlockley, one of the team members of the Open Attribute project.
Creative Commons licensed content is awesome, and everywhere—from Flickr, to Wikipedia, to your favourite library. Attributing it properly, and telling people how to attribute it properly can be difficult and confusing. The first rule for re-using openly licensed content is that you have to properly attribute the creator. That's why a group of hackers and educators came together to create OpenAttribute, a set of tools for giving credit where it's due. OpenAttribute is a suite of tools that makes it ridiculously simple for anyone to copy and paste the correct attribution for any CC licensed work. These tools include a browser extension to query the metadata around a CC-licensed object and produce a properly formatted attribution that users can copy and paste wherever they need to.
Creative Commons licensed content is awesome, and everywhere—from Flickr, to Wikipedia, to your favourite library. Attributing it properly, and telling people how to attribute it properly can be difficult and confusing. The first rule for re-using openly licensed content is that you have to properly attribute the creator.
That's why a group of hackers and educators came together to create OpenAttribute, a set of tools for giving credit where it's due.
OpenAttribute is a suite of tools that makes it ridiculously simple for anyone to copy and paste the correct attribution for any CC licensed work. These tools include a browser extension to query the metadata around a CC-licensed object and produce a properly formatted attribution that users can copy and paste wherever they need to.
This is a guest post by James Burke
A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources (OER) from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Commonwealth of Learning (COL):
This Guide comprises three sections. The first – a summary of the key issues – is presented in the form of a set of ‘Frequently Asked Questions’. Its purpose is to provide readers with a quick and user-friendly introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER) and some of the key issues to think about when exploring how to use OER most effectively. The second section is a more comprehensive analysis of these issues, presented in the form of a traditional research paper. For those who have a deeper interest in OER, this section will assist with making the case for OER more substantively. The third section is a set of appendices, containing more detailed information about specific areas of relevance to OER. These are aimed at people who are looking for substantive information regarding a specific area of interest. by Asha Kanwar (COL) (Editor), Stamenka Uvalić-Trumbić (UNESCO) (Editor), Neil Butcher (Author)
This Guide comprises three sections.
by Asha Kanwar (COL) (Editor), Stamenka Uvalić-Trumbić (UNESCO) (Editor), Neil Butcher (Author)
Page 8 and Appendix 1 (page 47 onwards) provides a useful introduction to Creative Commons and "open licences" relating to OER.
This is a great video from @youthandmedia which is a @berkmancenter project on how young people are learning online using and creating open resources.
One of the learners talks about how her school doesn't approve of Wikipedia but she uses it as a starting point and uses the references from the Wikiepedia article to carry out further research and study.
Another young learner talks about how she creates her own instructional YouTube videos on how to look after hamsters!
It's great to hear how they are learning all the time, using a variety of media.
The Guardian and BBC Radio 4’s Today’s programme have featured the growing momentum in the Open Access debate in the UK.
The Guardian piece ‘Wellcome Trust joins ‘academic spring’ to open up science’ by Alok Jha makes reference to the Cost of Knowledge protest against Elsevier as well as featuring Sir Mark Walport from the Wellcome Trust.
This was the first ccSalon in the UK for several years and it was even more special as we had Cathy Casserly, the CEO of Creative Commons with us to take part in the panel on open education.
We are grateful to Nature Publishing Group & Annette Thomas, CEO of Macmillan Publishing for their kind support in hosting the event. We would also like to express our thanks to iCommons Ltd with funding from the Kusuma Trust Foundation for their support.
We are also grateful to all those who attended and participated in the event.
Joi Ito - "The issue of license proliferation" (Joi Ito) / CC BY 3.0
This is a post from 2010 written by the Chair of Creative Commons @joi. This post made so many important points about licence proliferation and friction that we've decided to repost it here.
When I was on the ICANN board, we were dealing with the issue of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), an initiative to allow non-latin characters in domain names. Technically, it was difficult and even more difficult was the consensus process to decide exactly how to do it. Many communities like the Chinese and Arabic regions were anxious to get started and were getting very frustrated with the ICANN process around IDNs. At times, it seemed like the Arab Internet and the Chinese Internet were ready to either fork away and make their own Internet to solve the problem or were ready to introduce local technical "hacks" to deal with the issue which would have broken many applications that depended the standard behavior of the Domain Name System. Luckily, in the end, we were able to come up with some basic understandings around IDNs after a lot of work. The Internet held together in one piece, almost impossibly so.
Even though OER has a new global logo it is one of those terms that appears to have no formally agreed definition and people’s use of and reference to the term OER changes over time.
“The term OER is broad and still under discussion” and over the past few years OER has been used as a “supply-side term” and remained “largely invisible in the academy”. Metaphors (“Open Education and OER is like…?”) have been used to take a light hearted look at potential issues and tensions such as those between “Big OER and Little OER” and all in-between. On the definition front Stephen Downes has written a useful “Half an Hour” essay: “Open Educational Resources: A Definition” and David Wiley (Open Content and the 4Rs) recently put forward: “2017: RIP for OER?” (or not…)
The FAQ page for Open Education Week (this week, 5th to 10th March 2012) provides a useful, current overview of OER and Open Education.
This is a Guest Blog kindly provided by Bill Thompson.
Changing the world is a hard, grinding, thankless and usually unsuccessful enterprise, as failed political leaders, bankrupt entrepreneurs and unfashionable visionaries will be happy to testify if you can get them out of prison or contact them from beyond the grave.
One reason is the organisational inertia of most tribes, institutions and states, which means that the sheer effort needed to change direction on even trivial matters is beyond the scope of most campaigners. Another is the complex set of interrelationships that characterise even the smallest societies, where changing one thing can have unforeseen consequences and resistance can spring up from the most unexpected quarters, even when the proposals are themselves relatively uncontroversial.
The video below is of the presentation that Larry Lessig gave when he was in London recently and spoke at the ORGCON2012.
The talk is a fascinating knitting together of various subject areas including political funding, corruption, as well as free culture and copyright.
In case you haven't heard about it yet there is an exciting video competition with a chance to win $25,000.
Make a video explaining Why Open Education Matters. As Arne Duncan (US Secretary of State for Education) says in this video not enough people know about Open Educational Resources (OER). Why not help change that by making and entering your video in the competition. The competition is global and entries must be in by 5th June 2012. Best of luck!
A great video by OFFBOOK from PBS arts The internet has intensified connections between people across the planet. In this episode we take a look at the impact of this new interconnectivity on the art world. Traditional funding models are dissolving, new forms of expressing ownership have arisen to accomodate for remix culture, and artists are finding ways to connect physical art experiences and traditions to the internet. In the digital era, the experience of art from the perspective of the artist and the art audience is shifting rapidly, and bringing more people into the creative process. Featuring: Yancey Strickler, Co-Founder of Kickstarter Lawrence Lessig, Co-Founder of Creative Commons Ciel Hunter, Creative Director of Creators Project Julia Kaganskiy, Editor of Creators Project
A great video by OFFBOOK from PBS arts
The internet has intensified connections between people across the planet. In this episode we take a look at the impact of this new interconnectivity on the art world. Traditional funding models are dissolving, new forms of expressing ownership have arisen to accomodate for remix culture, and artists are finding ways to connect physical art experiences and traditions to the internet. In the digital era, the experience of art from the perspective of the artist and the art audience is shifting rapidly, and bringing more people into the creative process.
Featuring:
Cameron Sinclair is the 2006 TED Prize winner and co-founder (and “Chief Eternal Optimist”) of Architecture for Humanity (@archforhumanity) and the Open Architecture Network, a non-profit that seeks architecture solutions to global crises.
Hundreds of projects are available on the Open Architecture Network and are all licensed with a Creative Commons licence – eg “Adaptable Hillside Classrooms”.
Each project contains a workspace, team profiles, project updates and access to related files that aims to offer open source architectural plans and blueprints on the we
This is a Guest Blog kindly provided by Alma Hales and Andy Lane of the Open University.
It is 5 years since The Open University seriously investigated whether it should join the then small but growing band of Universities making some of their educational content openly and freely available to all around the world. MIT and a few other US institutions had already done so to great fanfare and acclaim. It is 4 years since we also had to decide which licence to adopt for this major venture, which has since become the set of websites called OpenLearn
This Saturday is Culture Freedom Day, a worldwide celebration of free and open culture through education efforts, on- and offline events, and promoting artists who work in free culture. Culture Freedom Day is organized by Digital Freedom International, a nonprofit that also promotes software freedom. As stewards of the open licenses and tools that enable [...]read more...
From 2007 to 2011, COMMUNIA was a project funded by the European Commission to explore the role of the public domain in the digital age. Over four years, COMMUNIA, or The European Thematic Network on the Digital Public Domain, gathered over 50 members from academia and the CC community to research, promote, and preserve the [...]read more...
From TechnoLlama: Creative Commons affiliate Andrés Guadamuz attended the 9th session of the Committee on IP and Development at WIPO to present CC’s comment on the Agenda Item CDIP/9/INF/2: Scenarios and Possible Options Concerning Recommendations 1c, 1f and 2a of the Scoping Study on Copyright and Related Rights and the Public Domain. The Study by Prof Dussolier can be located here for reference. The recommendations that we are talking about are: “1(c) The voluntary relinquishment of copyright in works and dedication to the public domain should be recognised as a legitimate exercise of authorship and copyright exclusivity, to the extent permitted [...]read more...
The Saylor Foundation provides global grants of US $20,000 to college textbook authors seeking to openly license their educational textbooks for use in free Saylor college-level courses. Authors maintain their copyright and license textbooks to the world via Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) to enable maximum reuse, remix, and redistribution. To learn more and apply, [...]read more...
From Public Interest Intellectual Property Advisors: The Journal of Public Interest IP is the first publication of its kind that solely focuses on the range of legal rights within the umbrella of IP and the complex ways it impacts human capabilities and endeavors. The human development and capabilities approach will provide a broad and useful framework for analyzing the social impact of IPRs because the approach defines the purpose of development as enlarging the choices and capabilities that people have to lead a life they value. This framework focuses on a wide range of actual and potential human consequences that are [...]read more...
Stay up to date with CC news by subscribing to our weblog and following us on Twitter. The Liberated Pixel Cup: an epic contest for gaming freedom We’re pleased to announce the launch of the Liberated Pixel Cup, a free-as-in-freedom game authoring competition being launched in cooperation between Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation, Mozilla, [...]read more...
Today is Day Against DRM. If you don’t already, you should know that DRM stands for Digital Rights Management (or probably more accurately, Digital Restrictions Management), and that we have blogged about this day before for good reasons, including, DRM causes problems regarding fair use, lack of competition, privacy and security breaches, forced obsolescence, and [...]read more...
This year the Content in Context conference (organized by the Association of Education Publishers and the Association of American Publishers School Division) will host a free Metadata Lab centered around educational metadata adoption. The main highlights of the lab: Education data standards overview with Jack Buckley (NCES/CEDS), Ross Santy (US DOE), and Michael Jay (Educational [...]read more...
Dan bull / Tim Dobson / CC BY-SA Indie musician Dan Bull released “Sharing is Caring” into the public domain using CC0. Recently, “Sharing is Caring” reached #9 on the UK independent chart and #35 on the UK R&B Chart. Creative Commons United Kingdom interviewed Dan about why he chose to release his music for [...]read more...
Cathy Casserly / Ede & Ravenscroft / CC BY-SA In March, Cathy, our CEO, was recognized for her contributions to open education through an honorary doctorate awarded by The Open University. The Open University is home to the OpenLearn initiative, which makes available over 11,000 hours of structured learning via CC BY-NC-SA and has received [...]read more...
In March, Creative Commons, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Open Society Institute launched the Why Open Education Matters Video Competition. The goal of the competition is to raise awareness of Open Educational Resources (OER) and solicit short, creative videos that help explain what Open Educational Resources are and how they can be beneficial [...]read more...
This Saturday’s International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy will unveil a months-long collaborative effort — the Data Journalism Handbook, a free, CC BY-SA licensed book to help journalists find and use data for better news reporting. Data Journalism Handbook – Cover Mockup / jwyg / CC BY-SA A joint initiative of the European Journalism Centre [...]read more...
The Portable Legal Consent for Common Genomics Research, developed by the Consent to Research project, is a system through which users can donate their data to databases that remove identifying details, such as name and e-mail address. The databases then assign an identification number to all of the data from each user and deliver the de-identified data to researchers, who must agree to broad conditions designed to prevent harm to the data contributors. The project received approval from ethics reviewers on 23 April; as soon as May, anyone will be able to sign the consent and begin contributing their own data [...]read more...
iCommons Board member Dr. Cameron Neylon has been appointed as Director of Advocacy at Public Library of Science. According to the PLoS announcement: Cameron is well known in the scientific community, recognized for his professionalism, experience, vision and influence in scholarly publishing, communication, and research. His attendance at the Budapest Open Access Initiative meeting, advisory role for the Scholarly Communication in Africa Program, and leadership of the Open Society Foundation funded Beyond Impact project are recent examples of his focus on web technology to enhance research communication…. In his new position, Cameron will promote advocacy of open access and develop strategies [...]read more...
Edited by Melanie Dulong de Rosnay and Juan Carlos De Martin, the book “The Digital Public Domain: Foundations for an Open Culture” has just been released. It contains essays by academics, librarians, entrepreneurs, activists and policy makers, who were all part of the EU-funded Communia project. These authors argue that the Public Domain – that is, the informational works owned by all of us, be that literature, music, the output of scientific research, educational, material or public sector information – is fundamental to a healthy society. Under a CC Attribution license, the PDF can be downloaded here. The book can be purchased in all formats (hardback, [...]read more...
Open Science is getting attention by some of the UK’s most prominent mainstream journalists. The Guardian ran a lead story in Monday’s Guardian. See Alok Jha, Wellcome Trust joins ‘academic spring’ to open up science, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/09/wellcome-trust-academic-spring http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/09/frustrated-blogpost-boycott-scientific-journals Eddie Mair of BBC Radio 4 also hosted a discussion between Prof. Stephen Curry of Imperial College and Graham Taylor of the UK Publishers Association at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b01ddxcs at 24:19 minutes.read more...
Creative Commons has posted for public comment the first discussion draft of version 4.0. This draft moves CC further toward a single global license and is the product of an extended (and unprecedented) requirements gathering period involving input from CC affiliates, community and stakeholders. The new version fully licenses database rights on the same terms and conditions as copyright and neighboring rights, requires waivers of rights beyond copyright and neighboring rights (e.g., press publisher rights, catalog rights) but only if possible and then only to the extent necessary to allow the work to be used as intended under the license, and [...]read more...
iCommons co-hosted the recent ccSalon London on 29 March featuring a panel of experts in open education and a roomful of equally experienced educators and publishers. Moderated by Joscelyn Upendran, CC UK public lead, the panel featured Cathy Casserly, the CEO of Creative Commons, as well as Amber Thomas of JISC, Patrick McAndrew of Open University, and Victor Henning of Mendeley. The panelists discussed the definition of Open Educational Resources (OER) as one that allowed users to do more than simply access the materials but which also carried permission to modify, translate, customize, merge with other material and otherwise make it more useful to [...]read more...
The Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Data in Science Working Group and iCommons have filed a joint comment to the UK IPO in response to BIS0312: Exception for copying of works for use by text and data analytics. OKF and iCommons support the Hargreaves-proposed exception because 1) data sources and data sets are becoming far too large for individual researchers to efficiently process in manual fashion, 2) the burden on researchers to secure permission across thousands of journals is a significant obstruction to the use of scientific data by the research community. The comments go further and suggest that even the noncommercial exception [...]read more...
From NPG: Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is pleased to announce that 49 journals it publishes now support Creative Commons through an annual donation. Based on the 1,113 open access articles published in 2011 in these journals, NPG and its partners are donating $22,260 to Creative Commons (CC). “Creative Commons licenses are simple, standardized ways to grant copyright permissions to creative works. Publishers who adopt CC licenses get value from not having to create and explain customized terms of use,” said Cathy Casserly, CEO of Creative Commons. “We are thrilled that NPG recognizes this value with its financial contribution helping to [...]read more...
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