DRM and Defective By Design

The petition states, "We believe in a way of life based on the free exchange of ideas, in which books have and will continue to play a central role. Devices like Amazon's are trying to determine how people will interact with books, but Amazon's use of DRM to control and monitor users and their books constitutes a clear threat to the free exchange of ideas."

To add your name to the petition visit the Defective By Design site.

Turf War and the Future of E-Readers

The current nature of the eReader market has many of us convinced that books and ideas lose their value simply because they've been shared, and the truth cannot be further from that. It will be interesting to see if Defective By Design can gain the momentum to keep digital books from following the familiar path of content lock down.

The addition of Google Books as a partner is a significant one as the search giant's involvement promises to increase the public's ability to find works to share and remix. For now, CC licensed books are distinguishable by a Creative Commons logo to the left of the preview pane. In the future, licensing is likely to become an advanced search feature within the site. When that happens, remixing material will be so much easier to find.

For example, Google already prints full versions of out-of-copyright books for its Library Project. Once these books are tagged with the public domain license, thousands of out-of-copyright and sometimes out-of-print books will become easily searchable. We may see a renewed interest in our favorite classics, or see them altered in new and unusual ways. By showcasing CC licensed material, Google Books may prompt other companies like Flickr to further prioritize commons-friendly search.

If you'd like to place your Google Book under a CC license, you can do so in your account settings. To sign up to add a CC licensed work, visit the Google Books partner page

OpenID is a decentralized digital identity that allows for easy access to a number of networks. Members benefit from one singular identity and networks benefit from a lowered barrier to membership. In this way, more information is shared across a variety os social landscapes and therefore, as with Creative Commons, there are more opportunities for engagement and education.

Says open source advocate Chris Messina in a recent blog post on CC OpenID:

"Creative Commons is redistributing the brand equity and social capital their members have accrued over the last several years by letting people show and verify their affiliation to the organization.

With this simple example, we can start to see the symbiosis of making an intentional choice about identity: Creative Commons finds a new revenue opportunity and members of the community have a way to express their affiliation and promote the brand."

As an additional plus, Tracer adds, "Our data shows that those pages that users engage with most are not necessarily those with the most page views." With Tracer, publishers can find out their most sought after information and increase the relevancy of their resources to readers. Creative Commons is already using Tracer to see what readers are highlighting, copying and redistributing.

As well, Creative Commons' Fred Benenson encourages members to consider using the tool. He says, "As a creator and contributor to the commons, you have the right to attribution (all six of our licenses require it), so why not make it easy for your audience to automatically provide it?"

To test Tracer, members can register at Tynt.

Read more:
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/16060#ixzz0MCiF2lSE
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution
http://tracer.tynt.com/features-and-benefits-of-tracer#ixzz0MCg9SuUl
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution No Derivatives

For now, this search only includes CC-licensed images from Flickr, Yahoo's own photo sharing service. The Yahoo Image Search interface actually turns out to be a very nice gateway to the CC-licensed image collection on Flickr, especially because the previews update immediately after you change a filter setting.

Flickr's own search interface is relatively clunky compared to Yahoo Image Search and the filter settings on Flickr are hidden behind the advanced search feature which only appears after you have initiated a regular search. While this is also true for Yahoo Image Search, Yahoo remembers your settings between search sessions, which is quite a time-saver.

There are also a number of third-party tools for searching CC-licensed images on Flickr, including compfight, one of our favorites, but few are as slick as Yahoo's Image Search.

As we reported earlier this year, most Flickr users choose the most restrictive licenses for their images, but with over 100 million CC-licensed images on Flickr, chances are that you will find a good picture with the right license for almost any occasion.

Since ProPublica announced this policy, articles from ProPublica journalists have appeared in a wide variety of newspapers and online publications, including USA Today, Politico, Salon, The Denver Post, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Los Angeles Times, ABC News, and the Albany Times Union.

To some degree, ProPublica models an approach that could eventually help newspapers to stay afloat by pooling resources and making stories available across a wider network of papers.

ProPublica and Citizen Journalism

Just this week, ProPublica also launched a new citizen journalism project, the ProPublica Reporting Network, that invites citizens to "commit acts of journalism." As its first mission, the ProPublica is asking people to "adopt" a stimulus project and monitor it. Essentially, this project crowdsources investigative journalism, and given the scope of the stimulus bill, this might just turn out to be the only effective way of monitoring the efficiency of a project of this size.

Will More Projects Follow this Path?

It would be nice if other non-profit news organizations like the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting would adopt similarly liberal licenses, though for now, we think this is a great start. If you are aware of similar projects, please let us know in the comments.

The change will apply to all text and multimedia content, including video, images, and audio now licensed under GFDL 1.2 or later versions and will increase "the compatibility and availability of free content," according to the WMF site.

The change in licensing was made possible in November 2008 when the Free Software Foundation updated its most recent of the GFDL, adding language specifically to accomodate the WMF's desire to switch to Creative Commons licensing.

As we reported last month, in the event that the WMF board approves the proposal, existing content will be dual-licensed and new content will be CC-BY-SA licensed only. "This will ensure that any content shared from Wikipedia in the future can be done under the now broadly-used terms of Creative Commons licensing and without the additional restrictions required by the GFDL, which was created more for application code documentation and is slightly more stringent, for example requiring anyone using the content to include the full license code with each use," wrote RWW blogger Phil Glockner.

"When I started Wikipedia, Creative Commons did not exist," wrote Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on the site's Q&A page regarding the licensing changes. "The CC-BY-SA license is a more generic license that meets the needs of Wikipedia today, and I'm very grateful that the FSF has allowed this change to happen... It's a critically necessary change for the future of Wikimedia."

According to Facebook's own Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, users own all the content and information they post on Facebook, but, Facebook's users also grant Facebook a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook ("IP License"). We are not quite sure how Facebook's own license (which has created its share of controversy in the past) would play together with some of the more restrictive and open Creative Commons licenses.

Given that Creative Commons and its licenses are probably still relatively unknown outside of the small world of those who regularly follow copyright issues, it would probably be good if the application explained the different license choices in a bit more detail. The application links to the Creative Commons FAQ, but the information there is probably a bit too abstract for most users who just want a good idea of what license to choose - and why they might want to do that in the first place.

Maybe a link to this video from the Creative Commons or this slideshow would explain the purpose behind Creative Commons a bit better for new users.

The Wikipedia licensing Questions and Answers page contains a quote from Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales which sums up the necessity of the change:

"When I started Wikipedia, Creative Commons did not exist. The Free Documentation License was the first license that demonstrated well how the principles of the free software movement could be applied to other kinds of works. However, it is designed for a specific category of works: software documentation. The CC-BY-SA license is a more generic license that meets the needs of Wikipedia today, and I'm very grateful that the FSF has allowed this change to happen. Switching to CC-BY-SA will also allow content from our projects to be freely mixed with CC-BY-SA content. It's a critically necessary change for the future of Wikimedia."

Some parts of Wikipedia are already using the Creative Commons license, like many of the images that are uploaded by contributors. However, even with Wikimedia Commons, the default is GFDL.

The voting is ongoing and eligibility to vote is extended to all users who have made at least 25 edits to any Wikimedia project before March 15, 2009. Voting ends on May 3, 2009. Instructions are on the licensing page and are fairly simple; they say to "Visit the page called Special:SecurePoll/vote/1 on a wiki for which you meet the voting conditions."

Image courtesy of the Creative Commons blog.

The platform, inspired by Creative Commons and the notion of open software, is a collaborative effort between WFMU and others, including KEXP, dublab, KBOO, ISSUE Project Room, and CASH Music, all of whom work to curate the music made available on the site. Instead of fearing free downloads (as the music industry typically does), the belief here is that providing free downloads will actually encourage people to purchase music. Although all the tracks on the site are free, there are links that point to full album downloads which are not. Also, FMA users have the option of "tipping" an artist when they find something they like by sending money to the artist's PayPal account.

Obviously, the FMA is not a resource where you're going to find the latest Top 40 artists or classic tunes you know and love. This is because - let's face it - by the time you've heard of a band, someone has spent a lot of money making sure you did so. In other words, if you're not interested in seeking out new music, the FMA is not the place for you. For others, however, the site will be a treasure trove of discovery. You can delve into genres and sub-genres you may have never even heard of (Sludge? Glitch? Wow, I feel old now.)

To find good tunes to download, you can choose to browse by curator or genre using links at the top of the homepage. Next to each track is a down arrow button which saves the MP3 file to your computer. You don't have to register to download files, but if you want to take advantage of the site's social features, you do. Registered users can create friend lists, leave comments, become fans of the content, write blog posts, and create mixes.

If you're not sure where to get started on the FMA, WFMU's sample collections (Volume 1 and Volume 2) are good resources.

The Free Music Archive is in Beta right now and they promise that more features are coming in the future.

Derivative Works

While the highly restrictive BY-NC-ND license is the most popular CC license on Flickr (33%), the second most popular license (29%) is the BY-NC-SA license, which allows for derivative, non-commercial works, as long as the resulting work is licensed under the same license. In total, according to this study, about 63 million images on Flickr can be used for creating derivative works like films, photo montages, or animations.

Growth is Slowing

The growth rate for CC-licensed images on Flickr is slowing, however. The growth rate has slowed down from 13% in April 2006, to 4% in November 2008. Currently, the growth rate is holding stable at 4% per month.

Make Creative Commons Your Default on Flickr

If you want to make sure that all of your photos are covered under a Creative Commons license, just head to the Privacy & Permissions tab in your Flickr account settings, where you will find a Defaults for new uploads section. From there, you can change your default license. If you never changed it, it will currently mark all your new uploads as "all rights reserved."

Note: If you want to "Rock Flickr Like a Champ," have a look at this post.

Today, the Creative Commons Foundation is announcing a new tool called CC Zero. CC Zero isn't another legal license from the group, instead it's a legal tool that lets content creators give up the rights claims they are given by default and instead send their work into the public domain.

The Creative Commons Foundation's work is already extremely useful in finding content that's licensed for freely reusable work with certain conditions placed on it, like the section in Flickr where you can find photos you're free to reuse as long as you give credit to the original creator. A new tool that lets authors just push their work immediately into the public domain free of conditions should make content reuse and collaboration all the more friction free.

As things stand, US copyright law prohibits reuse without explicit permission for creative works until they enter the public domain - 70 years after the death of the author or 120 years after publication date if the date of death of the author is unknown. These lengthy periods leave the public domain pretty anemic. CC Zero will let content creators uninterested in copyright claims push their work into the public domain immediately.

A Well-Designed Tool

CC Zero has three components to it. The first is legal code, developed as all of CC's work is to be applicable with laws in every country around the world. The legal work was done in collaboration with two of Silicon Valley's very top legal firms, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Latham & Watkins. It should be pretty air tight.

The second component is a "human readable" text explaining how CC Zero works. You can read the CC Zero FAQ on this page.

The final component is machine readable code, making CC Zeroed content easily discoverable around the web. The Foundation says this should be particularly valuable in scientific work, but machine readable markup is interesting in all kinds of contexts. Try Googling for freely reusable content now to get an idea how this might work.

Early Examples

Two scientific projects are using CC Zero right away. The Proteomecommons Project is an academic project where scientists study large proteins. The Personal Genome Project is putting the genetic data of 10 individuals into the public domain for research using CC Zero.

The Foundation has been gathering Creative Commons case studies in a wiki since the middle of last year; that's a good place to find out about how people around the world have been putting CC's other work to use so far. Hopefully CC Zero projects will start appearing there soon.

The default copyright protection imposed by US copyright law, and increasingly around the world, might serve some people's interests well - but the availability of a tool to give up those "rights" and participate in the global free knowledge economy seems to us a very valuable effort. You can check out CC Zero on this page.

See also Microsoft's collaboration with CreativeCommons on a new scientific ontology plug-in for Office, also announced today.

Once FairShare has the content, it creates a custom RSS feed that delivers a running list of site links where the licensed content may be found. Each result contains a link to a FairShare page that has more information and a stored capture of the Web page in question. The collaboration with Creative Commons comes in when FairShare attempts to determine whether sites reusing your content are respecting the terms you've set in your Creative Commons license. For example, ads on the page violate conditions for one type of CC license, non-commercial reuse only.

The FairShare system was developed to help content creators discover all the ways their works were being used on the Internet. By automatically monitoring for re-use, authors get a better idea of who is taking inspiration from their works. This works well, but we would like to be able to pull up more detail on each site, for example WHOIS information.

FairShare is launching in beta today and is accepting new RSS feeds from anyone. If you have your own feed, go ahead and give it a try. You might be surprised (even pleasantly) by where your words appear and in what context.

We've covered his latest move in greater depth over at Jobwire, our site tracking hires in tech, new media and related industries. Join us there for more details on Lessig's latest career change.

Dylan, who coincidentally is the eldest son of folk legend Bob Dylan, uses his familiar style to aggregate a quick selection of scientists explaining why a web-based revision of copyright policy is so important for the advancement of scientists. "Scientists are the ultimate remixers," one interviewee says, and we agree that Creative Commons in science is a very exciting idea.

Few media are as compelling as video and we hope that this new short work is helpful in garnering support for Creative Commons in the sciences.

Dylan's work joins a long list of well made Creative Commons videos, which have been helpful in explaining the movement to revise copyright to countless people, no doubt including even President Elect Barack Obama, whose own website was recently put under a Creative Commons license.