Well, actually 1,999 – follow us now and share with others!

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Creative Commons is turning 10 this year. Therefore Creative Commons communities all over the world will be hosting a series of events and sharing party favors online for a ten-day celebration!

In December 2002 Creative Commons released its first set of copyright licenses for free to the public. In the years following the initial release, Creative Commons and its licenses have grown at an exponential rate around the world. The licenses have been further improved, and ported to over 50 jurisdictions. With some major platforms adopting the Creative Commons licenses and version 4.0 of the licenses around the corner, this anniversary is the perfect opportunity to reflect on the past ten years, but also to look ahead to the future!

One of the opportunities for Creative Commons to continue its rapid evolution is more collaboration between the various affiliates. During the Creative Commons regional meeting in Helsinki earlier this year we’ve decided to use the 10 year anniversary to make a joint contribution to the festivities in the form of a CC-Europe mixtape. Each country nominated a couple of songs and an expert panel of CC affiliates has picked one song per country for the final compilation. In total we’ve received contributions from 20 countries! The participating affiliates are Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Israel, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.

The resulting mixtape can be found at Free Music Archive, Soundcloud and Archive.org and is available for free download under various Creative Commons licenses. The album artwork is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution license.

You can check out all the anniversary events at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC10 and be sure to keep an eye out between December 7 and 16 for more surprises at http://www.10.creativecommons.org!

Share, Remix, Reuse – Legally

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.

Contact us via email at info [at] creativecommons.org.uk or Follow @CCUnitedKingdom

Why Open Education Matters from Blink Tower on Vimeo.

Artfinder is a UK start up, based in London which enables you to discover, experience and share art to build your own online art profile. Artfinder also enables users to submit their own images and essays about other artworks and license them with a Creative Commons licence.

This is a guest blog post from Jen Bayne, Artfinder’s Assoicate Marketing Manager about Artfinder and why Creative Commons is key to the organisation and their users.

This is a guest blog post from Jen Bayne, Artfinder’s Assoicate Marketing Manager about Artfinder and why Creative Commons is key to the organisation and their users.

Creative Commons is a wonderful enabler for Artfinder and its users who wish to retain control over the use and distribution of its visual and textual content online. Artfinder gets more art into people’s lives by allowing them to build their own online art world, helping them find exhibitions and art institutions to visit, and buy affordable and authentic art for their walls.

Artfinder has the largest online database of art, and Creative Commons is key in helping artists and institutions protect how content is used, shared and attributed in the digital sphere. Artfinder has therefore been able to continue to expand its database of artworks whilst encouraging user-generated content – this is vital for attracting new users and keeping our registered users engaged with new, exciting content.

Copyright law can be very complex and unwieldy. Creative Commons provides our users and partners with a clear, easy to understand and easy to implement framework to license content, whilst ensuring that they can control the guidelines on how their content is displayed, shared, attributed and commercialised. They can use Creative Commons to ensure their creations are credited and used in the ways they want at a granular, work-by-work level.

Photo by Manfred Kleinhofer, cc by sa

At Artfinder we hugely value the opinions and insights of our users and artists – and we use Creative Commons licenses to provide the framework for them to control and own their works and efforts. This framework has helped our users and partners to build and nurture the strong sense of community that exists on Artfinder.com. As a start-up this has been key in growing our business – and we are very grateful to Creative Commons and the Creative Commons community for contributing their works and essays to Artfinder for all to enjoy.

Find out more about Artfinder from this video of a talk (first 10 mins of video) by its Founder & CEO Spencer Hyman.

 This blog post ‘Growing Artfinder’s content and user engagement with Creative Commons’ by Jen Bayne, Artfinder’s Associate Marketing Manager, is CC BY licensed.

Lawrence @Lessig spoke recently at the UNESCO 2012 World Open Educational Resources Congress in Paris.

Lawrence Lessig. Photo by Harry Metcaffe

The talk emphasised the importance of copyright. Some key quotes from the talk include:

Copyright is essential for its purpose.I am against abolitionism… I think copyright is essential.

Prof. Lessig makes a distinction between authors/creators who are in a ‘privileged position’ such as scientists who do not have to rely on the publication and availability of their writings as other creators may, as scientists are paid in other ways, (he calls these people ‘privileged authors’). He goes on to say that:

being a privileged author carries an obligation to enable access to their work.

He also makes a distinction between ‘knowledge elites,’ in which he includes himself as a Harvard Professor, who have access to journals and other sources of knowledge to which elite universities in developed countries pay hefty subscriptions and says:

 knowledge elites have free access; the rest of the world not so

He recalls an example of when his new born baby was ill, he as a concerned parent, carried out online research about her medical condition. He calculated that the cost of accessing the journals that he managed to access to find out as much as he could about the medical condition would have been $435, had he not been one of the ‘knowledge elite’ who had access by virtue of being a Harvard Professor.

This is the video of the presentation Prof Lessig delivered in Paris 20 June 2012 UNESCO World OER Congress:

Khan Academy, the non-profit online educational video site has been featured by @BBCClick in this interesting short video about Khan and the ‘flipped classroom‘

Salman Khan with Bill Gates, photo by Steve Jurvetson

A few memorable quotes from the video include:

“Khan Academy now reaches more students in a single week than the Open University has in its entire history”

“To teach is to learn”

“a 42% boost to maths test scores” for a Californian school which has been using Khan Academy as part of their adoption of the flipped classroom.

The Khan Academy site is licensed with a CC BY NC and the videos have the CC BY NC ND licence.

Here’s an example of a Khan Video on The French Revolution.

This is a great talk by Director of @medialab and @creativecommons Chair @Joi Ito, given recently at the @NMCorg summer conference. Many subjects are covered in the talk including the decreasing cost of innovation, education and learning, harnessing networks, open data and open hardware.

Just a couple of the great lines from the talk include:

‘I hate to be educated but love to learn’

‘You can keep learning as you go. It’s more important to learn how to pull than it is to learn how to stock’

which is referring to the idea that you don’t need to carry around and stock knowledge in your head but be able to pull in what & whom you need as you go along thanks to the internet and networks.

Joi Ito, photo by David Hooker

Towards the latter part of the talk (30 mins onwards) Joi provides a very useful example of how innovation can flourish by harnessing networks by recounting how  @safecast got started. Safecast was created immediately after and as a result of the Japanese earthquake in March 2011. It was initially funded by @kickstarter. Safecast makes available data ‘by mapping radiation levels and building a sensor network, enabling people to both contribute and freely use the data collected.’  Safecast makes all their data (‘largest single database of radiation measurements in the world’) available with a CC0 waiver and currently has 3,163,969 data points collected. As Joi says:

‘this is an opportunity to take a tremendous amount of data and learn a lot from it but it only works if people share the data and allow us to do correlations.’

The examples provided from the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster highlights how empowering and even life saving openly shared data can be.

This is a guest blog post by Jon Spriggs (@jontheniceguy) about CCHits.net and its promotion of Creative Commons licensed music, artists and podcasts. Jon recalls his personal journey, motivations and influences in developing the site.

It’s always hard to talk about a project you’ve started. The inspiration for projects can come from a hundred different places and none of those are the key to why the project happened. CCHits.net is no different, but this post is here to talk about why CCHits.net (henceforth referred to as “CCHits”) came about and why Creative Commons plays so much of a part in how it all got started.

Let’s start with what CCHits is. It’s a website which promotes Creative Commons licensed music, the artists who make it, and the Radio shows and Podcasts which play it. It does this through three linked threads.

1. A daily, weekly and monthly podcast – showcasing a track each day, reviewing the week’s tracks and having a top 40 chart of tracks on the site.
2. Linking to track, artist and podcast/show pages to encourage more interest in the artists and podcasts – especially when finding a track that has been played on one show, but you spot that another show has also played it – perhaps you’d like more of the music played on that show?
3. Encouraging voting on tracks – whether through the daily, weekly and monthly shows, or via the shows not internal to CCHits.net – so at podcasts like The BugCast, for example, Dave and Caroline Lee will include vote links to CCHits.net for each show.

CCHits was a project I launched on 24th October 2010, but I’d been working on the idea since around August. I’d been an avid podcast listener for nearly 6 years, and by August 2010, I wanted to be a part of it.

I’d liked the idea of Creative Commons since I’d come across the idea while listening to LugRadio, and was especially stirred by an almost off the cuff conversation between the presenters of the show, and a British guy I’d met only a few months before, called Matt Lee, who was a (or it may even have been “the”) campaign manager for the FSF. Although I liked the idea of Creative Commons, at that time I was only listening to speech-only podcasts, so I couldn’t really see how this great license might start being more useful. Next, I came across the license on Flickr, and thought that it was a great idea to license your photos under CC, but I couldn’t imagine it really being used anywhere else… and then I discovered music podcasts.

I still don’t really know where I came across The BugCast, but Dave Lee (and later, Dave and his wife Caroline), did a great show each week, and I got more and more involved in the community around the show. While I was listening to the shows, Dave would mention where he was getting his source material from – a promotions company here, a netlabel there, but every now and then he’d say “Jamendo“… A few shows later he mentioned that one of the artists who had submitted music to his show (although, to be fair, I don’t actually recall which album or artist it was) had released that under a creative commons license, and I thought “Ooooo”. I made a point of buying the album as I’d enjoyed it… and it got me thinking.

Along side this, I’d been a founding member of the Stockport Hackspace (which went on to become HAC:Manchester and when we started having meetings in a working space, I noticed that we were playing music on a semi-regular basis without a PRS or PPL license. Around the same time, there were news reports about shops receiving fines for not having a PRS license for staff singing commercially licensed music at the tills, or for playing music for the staff but with the number of customers in the premises it meant that they were classed as playing a public broadcast of the music. I thought about the Creative Commons music I’d been listening to, and thought this was a good match for the hackspace. My initial release of the project was supposed to have been aimed specifically at the Hacker and Maker Spaces around the UK… but something else happened instead.

Dave Lee made a point of promoting the Association of Music Podcasting, and I started to listen to more and more music podcasts. Only ones and twos here and there, but I slowly started to properly appreciate the great works that were CC licensed, so in early October 2010, I went to the Sheffield Podcrawl (a pub crawl with podcasters and listeners to podcasts), and brought my idea to a group of generally wary but interested and receptive podcasters. I’d already done a fair amount of the work on getting the concept ready. I had a reasonable idea of what I wanted the site to do, and I had a bit of a demo ready to show people, and when I left the Podcrawl, I had interest from a few shows, but Dave and Caroline were behind me 100%.

What only Dave and Caroline (and a few other friends and family) knew at the time was that my wife was 4 months pregnant, and as such, there was no way I was going to be able to commit to doing the daily, weekly *and* monthly podcasts I’d been thinking about creating, so I toyed with the idea of using a text-to-speech engine for creating the show bumpers. I was aware Dan Lynch and Fabian Scherschel had used the Festival text-to-speech engine to provide details on how to get in touch with their Linux Outlaws show each week, and I thought that seemed like a great idea. It took a week or so to nail down the text, and the show generation software which needed no human intervention (HA! As IF!), but by the 24th October I had enough to roll out a show. Within a week I’d fixed more bugs in the show generation process than I thought I’d ever had written, and a year and a half later and a complete rewrite under my belt, I’m still fixing bugs on a regular basis.

So, where does the Creative Commons aspect come into this?

I’m pretty cautious about doing anything which is contrary to the law. It comes from having grown up in a household with a police officer as a father, and a teacher as a mother. You get the stern, disappointed look from your mother every time you do something you know she’ll hate to tell your father about, and frankly as you grow up, that look of disappointment just gets worse and worse. I’m now 34, and now I don’t even need to see that disappointed look… and to make matters worse, I know that my father participated in quite a lot of take-downs of pirate radio stations while I was growing up – only small ones, there were no “Radio Caroline”‘s around where I lived – but it made me quite serious and cautious about playing music I didn’t have the rights to play… so Creative Commons played a very key part to my choices. If Creative Commons hadn’t existed, then I probably would never have considered starting my own show – partially because I’m sure that many of the shows I’ve enjoyed listening to would never have had the content to play. Sure, there was always the promotion companies, but I couldn’t see any way that it would have been sustainable, and I’m sure I’d been even more cautious about playing music from one of those at my local hack space.

I made a specific choice with CCHits that I wanted to be sure that, given the interest, anyone could take what I’d done and re-use it. I found a previous project with similar goals and aims to my own but they used a proprietary platform that they didn’t own. When I came to look at what they’d done, I didn’t know whether every track in that site was legitimately Creative Commons (and as it turned out, many of the later submitted tracks weren’t), and there was no clear way to find out what sort of measures of people had liked tracks before. I used this experience, and a conversation with Evan Prodromeau from the StatusNet project about making data free and open, encouraged me to make the database behind CCHits.net free and open… to the extent that all of the data is (CC-0), all of the tracks the full range of CC licences and CC0, and even thesoftware which drives the site (AGPL) is free and open. Using that combination of “stuff” you could take and completely replicate the CCHits project! (I’d much rather you send me patches though!)

Creative Commons lets me feel confident that what I’m doing is appropriate and approved. It has encouraged me to seek out new sources of music, to actively encourage people to consider licensing or re-licensing music under a CC license, and on the whole, lead a better life with music.

Thank you, Creative Commons.

This blog post ‘Creative Commons made it easy to start CCHits.net’ by Jon Spriggs (@jontheniceguy)is licensed with a CC BY licence