Under SOPA, websites can be blacklisted and removed from the Internet if they appear to be infringing on intellectual property or distributing copyrighted works. This is especially troublesome for artists whose work depends on fair use law and resides at the intersection of art, mass media critique and appropriation.

Brian Kirkbride, co-founder of OtherPeoplesPixels.com, a website building service that designs and hosts artists' professional portfolios, joined in on the actions against SOPA and the PROTECT-IP bill.

"SOPA makes it nearly impossible to exist as a provider of hosting for user-contributed creative works," Kirkbride tells us. "It's difficult to imagine an OtherPeoplesPixels, YouTube, Tumblr or even Twitter existing in a post-SOPA world. The same goes for Facebook."

The law would also confiscate payments made to OtherPeoplesPixels, effectively shutting down the entire business and deleting thousands of artists' websites.

"Even if we assume the best of intent behind these laws," continues Kirkbride, "they are so flawed with regard to issues of Free Speech, security and a usable Internet that everyone should know about and oppose them."

Chicago-based artist Stacia Yeapanis utilizes appropriated and often times copyrighted imagery and video to explore America's love/hate relationship with mass-media and pop culture. Her work lives both online in the Art World's white cube gallery, and serves as an important critical take on the mediated culture that influences us on a daily basis, whether we care to admit that fact or not.

Yeapanis' Buffy Summers #2 is a cross-stitch embroidery based off an appropriated screenshot from the popular TV series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

SOPA would condemn work such as Yeapanis' by obliterating fair use law, which allows artists and other creatives to use copyrighted material for "transformative" purposes including commentary, criticism or parody.

"As artists we will lose a key avenue of dissemination [if SOPA passes], one that allows people to get interested in art who would never go to a gallery," Yeapanis tells us. "The possibilities of this are just beginning to be explored."

Last week, Internet service provider GoDaddy said it supported SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). But the Internet fought back. Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh threatened to move his company's thousands of domains. In the end GoDaddy flip-flopped its stance.

"I think that SOPA and PROTECT-IP have been pushed by a small but powerfully connected entertainment industry with an expert lobbying organization," Kirkbride says. "What they are attempting involves technology that can be difficult to explain and they've done a good job of marketing it as 'protecting against piracy.'"

Art via StaciaYeapanis.com.

What's so great about CC photos? For one thing, they are an incredible boon for follow-on creativity. Creativity, the good people of Creative Commons argue, always builds on the past. In a read-write world on the web, the less we're slowed down by standard copyright when it isn't applicable (when we want to share our work with people freely) then the more our photos, music and writing can serve as a platform for explorers who would go further regarding the topics we've engaged with and published on.

Flickr, on the other hand, is a great place to post photos for posterity. And it's a great place to find photos to illustrate written work, like the photo I posted at the top of this article. That's a photo of people celebrating a Portland Timbers soccer win, by Flickr user Frozenchipmunk. (Probably not that person's real name.) I always start my Flickr searches at http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-2.0/, the page for photos licensed as "by attribution" and without "non-commercial use only" limitations. I publish my own photos with a CC license, too, here.

Creative Commons, the organization, was founded in 2001 and it sure was well timed. The ensuing tidal wave of self-published multi-media content would have suffered substantially if it had no options but the dominant default copyright regime.

I wish Flickr was more encouraging of people to apply CC licenses to their photos, but traditionally the site was used extensively for personal pictures not intended for re-use. That so many photos are published CC on the site is an incredible asset for the future of creativity online.

Below, a photo I took of Portland's Chinese Classical Garden. Go ahead and re-use it, I only require that you credit me for taking it. Thanks, Creative Commons!

Creative Commons on YouTube will allow users to splice clips or scenes from other videos through the YouTube Video Editor. Copyright and Creative Commons can be a tricky area as there are several different Creative Commons options. YouTube tries to make it easy by using only one -- CC BY 3.0 -- that permits users to share and adapt content for commercial use provided that attribution is given to the original creator.

YouTube joins photo-sharing sites like Flickr that have Creative Commons options included with every upload that a user makes. The use of Creative Commons and fair use photos is one of the reasons that Flickr became one of the de facto places to share photos on the Web and helps the site sustain a vibrant community.

Creative Commons source attribution will be seen on the right under the video player in YouTube.

The use-case for Creative Commons on YouTube means that an extremely wide-variety of videos and clips will become available to users in creating derivative works or mash ups. As YouTube says in a blog post announcing the Creative Commons; "Maybe you were creating your own music video and needed an aerial video of Los Angeles at night to spice it up. Unless you had a helicopter, a pretty powerful camera and some fierce editing skills, this would have been a big challenge."

Available photographs and video are available for free use so long as the user gives attribution and does not alter the products. For the record, all the photographs and video in this post are from Al Jazeera.

Tahrir Square, Cairo

Protester on statue

Protester under flag

Where have you been finding photographs and video about the Egyptian uprising that have been either released under Creative Commons or otherwise made available for reuse? Leave a link in the comments.

Updated: Another source for free photos and videos is the We are Khaled Said Facebook page.

Works are part of the public domain when their copyright expires or when the artist designates the work as such. This means that people can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work - even for commercial purposes, without asking permission.

"The Public Domain Mark is a further step on the path towards making the promise of a digital public domain a reality," said American University law professor Michael Carroll, a founding board member of Creative Commons. "Marking and tagging works with information about their copyright status is essential. Computers must be able to parse the public domain status of works to communicate its usefulness to the public. The metadata standard underpinning the Public Domain Mark and all of CC's licensing and legal tools are what makes this possible."

Labelling works as part of the global public domain is challenging as different countries have different intellectual property laws. Creative Commons says it is working on a system for identifying works that are in the public domain, but in only a limited number of countries.

Results of a study by Shareable Magazine and Latitude Research (led by Kim Gaskins) contend that indeed it has. A survey of over 500 Web users finds that people who share online are more apt to share offline, in part the study argues, because they've learned to trust each other online.

It's part of a move the authors of the research trace from an ownership economy to an access economy. In this new economy, a variety of new services have been developed in order to allow people use of an asset without having to actually buy or own it.

Share and Share Alike

Sharing was defined by participants as "borrowing or lending an item for free, seconded by co-owning something with others: essentially, exchanges that involved no monetary gain, as well as synchronous access or collaborative efforts toward a shared goal." Over half the respondents identified renting and buying and selling used items as a form of sharing.

Some of the other findings include:

• Sharing online is a good predictor that someone is likely to share offline, too; 78% of participants felt that their online experiences make them more open to the idea of sharing with strangers.
• 85% of all participants believe that Web and mobile technologies will play a critical role in building large-scale sharing communities for the future.
• Age did not seem to make a difference in the propensity to share. And respondents age 40 and over were more likely to feel comfortable sharing with anyone at all who joins a sharing community, whereas younger respondents preferred to share among smaller social circles
• Three out of four participants currently share personal or informational content through social networking platforms, while 70% share digital media, and 68% share physical media like books and DVDs.
• Of those who share information and media online, two-thirds use other people's creations licensed under Creative Commons.

Opportunities for Social Startups

The report also looks at opportunities for entrepreneurs in building startups around social sharing. And those opportunities look good, considering that 75% of participants predicted that their offline sharing will increase over the next five years. The report notes in particular the opportunities in sharing transportation and physical spaces. Even though many of these services are not Internet-based, the report emphasizes the importance of the Web in building the peer-to-peer networks to facilitate sharing.

"The rise of sharing requires us to use a new language where 'access' trumps 'ownership'; social value becomes the new currency; 'exchanges' replace 'purchases'; and people are no longer consumers but instead users, borrowers, lenders and contributors. All of this means businesses must redefine their role from providers of stuff to become purveyors of services and experiences," says Neela Sakaria, SVP of Latitude.

Even though author Malcolm Gladwell recently contended that social media would not bring about revolution, the "New Sharing Economy" study does seem to indicate that our online interactions are having a substantial impact beyond just the realm of communication and culture.

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.