Open Media Review » creative commons

Flickr User CC Licensing Survey

Thomas Gideon — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:24:05 +0000

Alek Tarkowski from CC Poland is conducting a survey on how CC licenses are understood and used through the Flickr photo sharing service. Identify information is purely optional, so you can take the survey completely anonymously. Alex is using the data to develop a report and the Creative Commons folks are looking to add it to their ongoing case study.

I hope that it can also be used as a basis to help clarify Flickr’s support of CC licenses.

In the last year or so, there have been a couple of cases I have found distressing with CC at their core. CC was ultimately dismissed from the Virgin suit but the remarks of the plaintiff made it clear there is still quite a bit of confusion over licensing options at Flickr in general and the obligations of CC in particular for both licensers and licensees. Recently we’ve also had the Myxer suit which exposes some of the same issues as well as simply touching on concerns the CC folks have been working on for some time, like identifying works and uses in a more machine friendly fashion.

As the most popular license for open media, we are big fans of Creative Commons. Personally, I know there is much more work to be done on education folks on how best to use these licenses and what the effects their choice of license will have on practical situations involving their covered works. This survey seems like an excellent way to help share those concerns alongside some useful data on a service that does a brisk traffic in CC licensed material.

Creative Commons becomes more common

Mur Lafferty — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 13:38:43 +0000

One of the biggest problems with Creative Commons is simply that enough people don’t know about it. And heck, that’s not CC’s fault, not entirely. I try to do my part to let people know about it, and even though it’s beautifully written and easy to understand, some people still have problems wrapping their brain around it.

Thus I was thrilled this morning to discover the Creative Commons Documentation Project, a new project designed to explain the facets of CC licensing.

Alex Roberts, Senior Designer at Creative Commons, explained the benefits of the documentation initiative. “We’re always trying to make Creative Commons licenses easier to understand and use. From the beginning, CC has championed human-readable copyright licenses. Our documentation project works to extend this practice by offering short guides and explanations to a variety of CC topics.” All of the documentation is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license for redistribution, reuse and remix.

Get involved – read the press release

Creative Commons releases LiveContent 2.0

Mur Lafferty — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:14:49 +0000

Natalie Metzger wrote in to tell us about the new Creative Commons DVD.

Creative Commons recently released a live DVD called LiveContent 2.0. It looks like it is a Fedora live DVD (Linux) with oodles of CC licensed content goodness contained within (including audio, text, video, and educational resources). It’s interesting to see how an open source platform has been paired with creative commons content in such a possibility useful way. I haven’t tried it out yet for myself, but it looks like it has a lot of creative potential.

You can find one of the articles about it here: http://www.fanaticattack.com/2008/creative-commons-releases-free-contentsoftware-with-livecontent-dvd.html

Parts of Strange Horizons are Creative Commons licensed

Mur Lafferty — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:08:36 +0000

The Creative Commons blog reported in July that Strange Horizons (recently featured in OMR) is giving its authors the ability to publish via CC. This is a decision the individual authors of articles and stories are making, not the magazine as a whole, so please check the license of any article you read before you share or make derivative works.