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This page aggregates blogs by people or organizations who write about CC topics, including people affiliated with CC or jurisdiction projects. To be included, a blog must minimally be under a CC license and contain all highly relevant posts, or be able to provide a feed of all highly relevant posts (e.g. a category feed). Contact webmaster@creativecommons.org if you know of a blog that should be included here. Opinions are those of individual bloggers.

Twitter

James Boyle, July 01, 2009 06:40 PM   License: Attribution 3.0 Unported

I am a terrible poster boy for web 2.0 — I’ve spent a lot more time working to protect it than actually using it.  But recent experiences giving a lecture in Britain convinced me that Twitter really could be useful so I decided to take the plunge.  I am now “thepublicdomain” http://twitter.com/thepublicdomain

Mark my words, it will be car phones and electric typewriters next…

Shakespeare Debate

James Boyle, July 01, 2009 05:19 PM   License: Attribution 3.0 Unported

I am on Radio West today, talking about a subject far from intellectual property — the authorship of Shakespeare’s works, the subject of a novel that I wrote two years ago, called The Shakespeare Chronicles

For those who are interested, I have also included the brief I wrote when I was Shakespeare’s “lawyer” in a mock trial called In Re Shakespeare in front of three Supreme Court Justices.  (I got the verdict but Justice Stevens has since declared that he thinks Shakespeare was really the Earl of Oxford.)  If you’d like to see a fragment of me presenting the oral argument in that debate — and being cross examined by Justice Stevens –  there is a small video excerpt on Youtube.  (Note the nice ducktail haircut — what can I say, it was the late 80’s.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) - Reintroduced

Michael Carroll, June 29, 2009 11:14 AM   License: Attribution 2.5 Generic

Senators Lieberman and Cornyn have reintroduced the Federal Research Public Access Act (S. 1373), which would require agencies with large research budgets to develop public access plans to make the peer reviewed journal articles reporting the results of research funded by these agencies publicly accessible over the Internet. In essence, this bill would take a large step toward generalizing the principle established by the NIH Public Access Policy. This is great news. For more information about what you can do to support the bill, see the Alliance for Taxpayer Access page.

Yahoo Brings CC Filters to Image Search

Lorenzo de Tomasi, June 26, 2009 04:00 PM   License: Attribuzione-Condividi allo stesso modo 2.5 Italia

On May 26th, 2009, on Yahoo’s Search Blog, Polly Ng and Anuj Sahai announced the addition of CC license image filtering options to their image search and also explained why CC licenses are so important for finding images online. Finding a great image online elicits a little thrill, but it ...

WordPress License plugin

Lorenzo de Tomasi, June 26, 2009 04:00 PM   License: Attribuzione-Condividi allo stesso modo 2.5 Italia

Creative Commons has created an interesting plugin for WordPress that permits to easily choose a specific icense for your website and publish it in the footer. We are working for improving it. I think it can be improved and these are my suggestions: add an explicative xhtml text template in the ...

Wikipedia community vote on migration to CC BY-SA begins now

Lorenzo de Tomasi, June 26, 2009 04:00 PM   License: Attribuzione-Condividi allo stesso modo 2.5 Italia

A community vote is now underway, hopefully one of the final steps in the process the migration of Wikipedia (actually Wikipedias, as each language is its own site, and also other Wikimedia Foundation sites) to using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as its primary content license. This migration would be a huge boost ...

On being a creative commoner

Lorenzo de Tomasi, June 26, 2009 04:00 PM   License: Attribuzione-Condividi allo stesso modo 2.5 Italia

Domas Mituzas writes in an extremely nice post: It takes time to understand one is ‘creative commoner’. I do have a t-shirt with such caption, but it is much more comfortable once you start feeling real power of use and reuse of information. Few anecdotes… He tells stories of the joy of ...

Noncommercial use study: user questionnaire

Lorenzo de Tomasi, June 26, 2009 04:00 PM   License: Attribuzione-Condividi allo stesso modo 2.5 Italia

Creative Commons is launching the second and final round of a survey intended to collect information on how people understand the term “noncommercial use”. As previously announced, this study is funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and we are fortunate to have the help of a distinguished group of ...

The Free Music Archive Launches

Lorenzo de Tomasi, June 26, 2009 04:00 PM   License: Attribuzione-Condividi allo stesso modo 2.5 Italia

On 4th April 2009, WFMU celebrated the launch of its new website, The Free Music Archive, open to the public in its beta version. From FMA’s Jason Sigal: Every track [on the FMA] will be offered in high-quality without restrictions, registration, advertisements or fees. Many grant additional rights under Creative Commons agreements, ...

Download Remix by Lawrence Lessig

Lorenzo de Tomasi, June 26, 2009 04:00 PM   License: Attribuzione-Condividi allo stesso modo 2.5 Italia

The Bloomsbury Academic Press version of Lawrence Lessig last book, Remix, is now Creative Commons licensed (CC-BY-NC). You can download the book on the Bloomsbury Academic page.

CC Technology Summit 3: Turin, Italy

Lorenzo de Tomasi, June 26, 2009 04:00 PM   License: Attribuzione-Condividi allo stesso modo 2.5 Italia

The Creative Commons international community has organized two Technology Summits in 2008 — one in Mountain View, CA in June and one in Cambridge, MA in December. The third CC Technology Summit will take place June 26, 2009 in Turin, Italy at Politecnico di Torino. This is just ...

CC Internships

Lorenzo de Tomasi, June 26, 2009 04:00 PM   License: Attribuzione-Condividi allo stesso modo 2.5 Italia

Creative Commons are looking for a few good souls to intern this summer. Here's the link.

Cadyou, cad & 3D open-archive

Lorenzo de Tomasi, June 26, 2009 04:00 PM   License: Attribuzione-Condividi allo stesso modo 2.5 Italia

Cadyou is a community launched by Tom Moor in late 2008 whose goal is to create an archive of free, high quality 3D and CAD files for everyone to use, available in the Public Domain and under Creative Commons licenses. One interesting component of Cadyou’s content is its moderation policy: Unlike ...

COMMUNIA Conference 2009: keynote speeches preview (4)

COMMUNIA, June 26, 2009 07:20 AM   License: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

The keynote speech by Denis Noble (Emeritus Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology, University of Oxford) will deal with the new conceptual foundations and the structure of global collaborations, particularly addressing the “meeting of Biology, Mathematics and Computation”.
Having broken the human organism down into his smallest components, the 25,000 genes and maybe 100,000 proteins, biology of the 21st century faces the challenge of how to put it all back together again. The Human Physiome Project aims to do this, using collaborations worldwide between mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, engineers, biochemists, physiologists and even experts from the social sciences. The challenge is vastly greater than sequencing the genome. It raises big questions on the conceptual foundations of biology, and it requires unusual forms of collaboration. The analysis will first explain the principles of this area of science and then describe how the collaborations have been established to make it possible.

Please click here for the Conference complete programme. [26june09]

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COMMUNIA Conference 2009: keynote speeches preview (3)

COMMUNIA, June 24, 2009 11:20 PM   License: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Jerome H. Reichman (Duke University Law School) will explain how today's research community in a Microbial field which is outgrowing its “small science” institutional structures, must increasingly come to terms with commoditizing pressures within developed economies.
These pressures restrict the conduct of public-sector research through strong intellectual property rights and related contractual restrictions on access to and use of materials, publications, and data. At the same time, restrictive policies in developing countries under the Convention on Biodiversity complicate research uses of microbial materials held in public repositories ex situ, and make it increasingly difficult to access the vast in situ materials these countries control.
These trends have led to a proliferation of diverse licensing strategies and techniques, which collectively have elevated the transaction costs and other barriers for even relatively simple cooperative research projects. In order to avoid such obstacles, the research community goal is to use liability rules to promote the exchange of materials: the redesigning a “soft” infrastructure able to better manage publicly funded research resources, without compromising downstream commercial applications and fruitful partnerships between the public and private sectors, or between developed and developing countries.

Please click here for the Conference complete programme. [25june09]

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Attribution v. Citation

John Wilbanks, June 24, 2009 09:44 PM   License: Attribution 3.0 Unported

There's an interesting tweet about attribution in the data web. And it raises a tension I run into a lot but haven't seen a lot written about: the shifting nature of what the word "attribution" means.

We have a fairly common understanding of attribution in our daily lives: credit where credit is due is mine, and it tends to be what most people think. This is whether one is a musician, a scientist, a teacher, or anyone who does creative or innovative work. We like getting credit for our work. No problem there.

This idea of attribution encompasses the idea that we should get credit for our ideas. That if I'm the first one to realize that a certain gene knockout cures death, that the idea is linked to me forever. Like we link Watson and Crick to the DNA discovery. In this sense, attribution is very similar to the scholarly concept of citation.

However, the word "attribution" in a copyright license is a different beast. It even has a different wikipedia entry (which I did not create, and have not edited, despite my temptation!). I don't like the first sentence a lot, because it's not clear that in copyrights, attribution is something that gets triggered by the making of a copy - not by the use of the ideas in the copyrighted work.

This is the thing about the law. It's narrow in a lot of places. And it's often not what we think it is. Mainly because it was written by lawyers, not regular people.

Let's look at the legal code of the Creative Commons Attribution license. It's interesting.

The license grants the following rights:

- to Reproduce the Work, to incorporate the Work into one or more Collections, and to Reproduce the Work as incorporated in the Collections;
- to create and Reproduce Adaptations provided that any such Adaptation, including any translation in any medium, takes reasonable steps to clearly label, demarcate or otherwise identify that changes were made to the original Work. For example, a translation could be marked "The original work was translated from English to Spanish," or a modification could indicate "The original work has been modified.";
- to Distribute and Publicly Perform the Work including as incorporated in Collections; and,
- to Distribute and Publicly Perform Adaptations.

See? It's about reproducing the work, adapting the work, and distribution. I don't need these rights to read a work, or study a data set, and take the ideas in the work or the data set. I only need them to make copies and derivatives. The law doesn't allow ideas or facts to be covered by copyright. But don't take it from me, take it from the US Government:

"Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed."

Now, because copyright doesn't protect these things, "attribution" in the sense of the license doesn't apply to ideas or facts either. Those rights above are conditional on my compliance with the terms of the license. Section 4 of the legal code lays out those conditions. If I fail to provide proper attribution, I lose the right to make and distribute copies and derivatives. I do NOT lose the right to "steal" the ideas in the article and claim them my own, because those ideas are not subject to copyright, and cannot be made subject to the attribution requirement.

This is where understanding that to the law, attribution is a very specific term of art, which is very different from what we think casually and commonly. Citation is much closer to the way we think than what is enabled in public copyright licenses or, for that matter, private copyright licenses.

This is why we recommend waiving attribution in the Science Commons protocol for open access to data. It's a narrow legal term that can screw with interoperability, while at the same time failing to provide what people really want, which is credit where credit is due.

Puneet Kishor, one of our fellows, got it right. We shouldn't use the law to make it hard to do the wrong thing. We should use technology to make it easy to do the right thing.

When it comes to data, and in particular to data interoperability, enabling citation and provenance that is easy to track and cite will serve the scientific goals far better than an attempt to port open source "principles" into a world where they fundamentally don't fit.

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COMMUNIA Conference 2009: keynote speeches preview (2)

COMMUNIA, June 23, 2009 10:14 PM   License: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Hans F. Hoffmann, Geneva's CERN honorary member, will discuss the “Open, global collaborations in particle physics”.
A new project at CERN will create matter and observe it as it existed very close to the violent developments immediately after the big bang. This requires apparatus of unprecedented complexity, invented, elaborated, built, operated and exploited by global collaborations over decades and served by global e-infrastructures, also produced in the context.
Common clear objectives, mutual respect, complete sharing of all available knowledge, know-how, and necessary technologies within the collaborations, critical mass, flat hierarchies, rigorous quality assurance and the pledge of best efforts by the participating scientific institutes and funding agencies are the important ingredients of such collaborations.
They are brought to life by a continuous, (self-) structured and “accessible to all” communication at all levels. While immediate gainful applications are not the first priority, the collaborative model presented and implemented in this project can be applied to other large efforts and great challenges.

Please click here for the Conference complete programme. [24june09]

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State of Innovation Summit

John Wilbanks, June 23, 2009 05:39 PM   License: Attribution 3.0 Unported

I'm at the Seed - Council on Competitiveness State of Innovation Summit. I was thinking about live blogging, but find that doing so makes it hard for me to think about what people are actually saying. There's a webcast if you're interested.

As far as conferences go, it's a good one. Rock stars on the stage (E.O. Wilson is a hero of mine) and interesting conversations about innovation.

But I'm frustrated, as I often am at "innovation" conferences. What follows is a bit of a rant directed less at this event, which as I said is a good one, but at the conversation I hear all the time about scientific innovation. There are three problems.

Problem 1: there's almost no conversation about the essential theories of emerging innovation - open, user-driven, distributed. This is about the new forms of innovation that the network enables, and should be on every agenda of every meeting that claims to talk about innovation. If we simply do things the old way, but bigger, we fail. Disruptive innovation models ought to be part of the conversation and they too often aren't.

Problem 2: there's no conversation about technical infrastructure for innovation. Here's what I mean by that: the internet is infrastructure for innovation in culture and commerce. It underpins an enormous amount of economic value, and from it emerges disruption that we could never have predicted, like the Web. And the web in turn begat Google, Amazon, Facebook, blogging, you name it. Both of these systems work this way because they are public systems. Yet we don't talk about an open public technical infrastructure for science. We build individual bits of it, but our vision is investing in unconnected nodes, not networks.

On top of this, there is the assumption that because the web works for culture, it works for science. But the Web is a system built for documents - it's infrastructure for documents. Science innovation depends on data. This conference had a great panel on data, with Ben Fry, who's a data visualization wizard. Yet no conversation that the infrastructure we have for the Web completely fails at data. Infrastructure for making the web function on data is woeful - format standards, annotation, and so on are always underfunded and first to cut in crisis.

Infrastructure for data integration, data federation, and so forth should be encoded directly into the open standards of the web and internet. Full stop. And we should talk about this problem more often. Otherwise people look at their iPhones, check for a latte, and assume this level of functionality scales from coffee to the bench. It doesn't.

Problem 3: there's no conversation about the way that our legal and policy regimes affect emerging modes of innovation. Data use is dependent on legal access to data. There's a range of data regimes across the world that make legal access to data conditional on rights being granted. Copyright licenses prevent innovative scientists from using software to index the literature and integrate it into the database world. Default settings on government policy create strong incentives for patenting smaller and smaller inventions by universities. Tenure and review systems encourage secrecy and withholding.

Taken together, these three problems represent the core "immune system" of science to disruptive change. That's not a terrible thing. Science should resist some disruptive changes. But right now, the disruptive change being resisted is the network. It's a terrible irony that at the moment we have the technical ability to send any content anywhere at almost no cost of distribution, we haven't got the technical and legal infrastructure to realize the potential of that ability for science. It's an even more terrible irony that the innovation resulting from that ability in culture is being constricted by the very policies and regimes we claim to promote innovation.

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COMMUNIA Conference 2009: keynote speeches preview (1)

COMMUNIA, June 23, 2009 01:40 AM   License: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Fiona Murray (Associate Professor of Management Technological Innovation & Entrepreneurship Group, Sloan School of Management, MIT) will focus on “Institutional foundations of scientific progress: implications for collaboration and participation”.
Today's knowledge is exchanged and accumulated within and across both formal and informal scientific institutions (libraries, journals, databases, etc.) that also include intellectual property rules and their licensing practices.
The way we choose to structure these institutions is critical in shaping collaboration and, more importantly, participation in scientific progress. Specifically, if access to knowledge is critical for full participation in scientific research, then the way we shape the rules of these institutions has profound implications for who participates and who is left behind.
The landscape of formal and informal institutions will determine whether innovation and knowledge production becomes truly democratized and is a much more robust and lasting mechanism for ensuring broad participation in science than simply mandating collaboration. There is a variety of quantitative evidence and research projects that do substantiate these claims, thus providing positive implications for scientific progress and the society at large.

Please click here for the Conference complete programme. [23june09]

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Media arabi e nuove tecnologie alla Camera di Commercio di Milano

Donatella Della Ratta, June 19, 2009 10:32 AM   License: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States


Mercoledì 24 giugno a Milano, Palazzo Giureconsulti (piazza Mercanti 2), a partire dalle ore 9.30, si tiene l’incontro dedicato a “Media e nuove tecnologie. Opportunità nel Mediterraneo e nel Medio Oriente“, co-organizzato da Creative Commons insieme a Promos, Regione Lombardia, Mgm Digital Communication / Meet the Media Guru.

Dal mondo arabo parleranno di strategie sui media e le nuove tecnologie:

L’incontro prevede poi una tavola rotonda con giornalisti e imprese del settore italiani. Nel pomeriggio la possibilità di organizzare incontri di business one-to-one per discutere di partnership Europa-mondo arabo su media e nuove tecnologie.

COMMUNIA Conference 2009 (Torino 28-30 June): programme

COMMUNIA, June 19, 2009 10:19 AM   License: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Torino-moleA.jpg; released by its author, Daniel Ventura, under the GNU Free Documentation License Under the title "Global Science and the Economics of Knowledge-Sharing Institutions", the Second COMMUNIA International Conference 2009 is scheduled for Sunday 28, Monday 29 & Tuesday 30 June 2009 in Torino, Italy.

The event will address the conceptual foundations and practical feasibilities of contractually constructed “commons” and related bottom-up public domain initiatives (joint policy guidelines, common standards, institutional policies, etc.) capable of offering shared access to a variety of research resources, identifying models, needs and opportunities for effective initiatives across a diverse range of research areas. [19june09]

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姓名標示,要標什麼? 法律嚴肅版

Bob Chao (柏強), June 19, 2009 07:53 AM   License: 姓名標示-非商業性-相同方式分享 2.5 台灣

之前曾寫過姓名標示,要標什麼?要標哪裡?一文,大概說明我個人看法。其實 CC 授權條款裡面也有明確告訴你要標哪些東西,我們以 3.0 預演版的條文來說明一下。首先是 4. 限制的 (a):

您必須在您散布或公開演播的每份重製物上,附上本授權條款複本或「統一資源識別符」(Uniform Resource Identifier) …… 保留所有與本授權條款有關的注意事項以及免除保證責任聲明

所以這邊就有兩個:授權條款的複本或 URI (粗略想成是授權條款的網址吧),與保留授權條款有關的注意事項及免除保證責任聲明 (原來有的請別刪,原來沒的也不用加)。

接著是 4(d),這邊很多一段段來看:

(i) 若有提供原始著作人姓名(或筆名),則您應提供之,且(或)若原始著作人及(或)授權人,在授權人的著作權聲明、使用條款或藉由其他合理方式指定第三人(例如,贊助機構、出版者、期刊)為姓名標示的對象(「姓名標示對象」),則您應提供該第三人的姓名;

簡單講就是作者指定的名稱,看是本名、筆名或其他單位 (例如贊助商、公司等) 的名稱。

(ii) 本著作名稱;(iii) 在合理實際可行的範圍內,授權人所指定與本著作相關之統一資源識別符,除非該統一資源識別符並非連結至本著作的著作權聲明或與關於本著作之授權資訊;

作品名稱跟作者指定的網址。

在改用作品的情況,則必須註明在改用作品中使用了本著作(例如「原始著作人之本著作的法文譯本」、「依據原始著作人之原著作而改編的電影劇本」等)

如果是改用作品 (修改他人作品而成的新作品),則要標註使用了哪些東西。不過有鑑於單一改用或彙編著作可能利用了太多作品、會標到天荒地老又耗費資源,這邊有個折衷方法:

在改用作品或彙編之情況,對改用作品或彙編全部有貢獻之作者若使用單一的表彰時,則本項所要求的表彰,最低程度應作為前述表彰之一部分,並至少與其他具有貢獻之作者的表彰方式同等明顯。

意思就是說只要所有被引用的作品標示的方式都一樣明顯的話,可以允許從上面那幾種標示方法裡選一部份使用即可,不需全放。

所以到底要放什麼?

整理一下,如果你只是單純引用、重製散佈別人的著作,那麼記得標上:

  • 原始作品授權條款的複本授權條款的 URI,以及
  • 作者指定的標示名稱,沒指定就是放他本名或筆名。還有
  • 作品名稱跟授權人指定的網址,沒指定的話可以不放網址。

也就是說,最少會放上授權條款 URI、作品名稱跟作者姓名。

如果這是改用或彙編(編輯)著作,那麼就是依據同樣的原則、把每個用到的作品都標上去。但只要所有用到的作品標示都一樣明顯,則作品名稱、作者姓名、授權人指定的網址這三者可以不用全放。(原著使用的授權條款要標示,不然會很混亂。)

其他可能?

4(a)裡其實有一個特殊的部份:

若您創作彙編,則應在收到任一授權人通知時,於實際可行的範圍內,依其要求移除彙編中,如第4條第(c)項所定對於原始著作人及/或其指定第三人的表彰。若您創作改用作品,則應在收到任一授權人通知時,於實際可行的範圍內,依其要求移除改用作品中,如第4條第(c)項所定對於原始著作人及/或其指定第三人的表彰。

意思就是說,在改用及彙編作品的情況下,原始作品授權人可以要求不要放他的名字 —— 除非已經獲得明示說可以不放,不然還是得先放上去喔!

Obama in Cyberspace

James Boyle, June 18, 2009 02:27 PM   License: Attribution 3.0 Unported

There have been some hiccups with the accessibility of my new Financial Times column.. which (ironically) is about accessibility.. Here it is.. (and thanks to the excellent Financial Times people who let me keep the copyright to my columns and allow me to put my own copies of those columns under a CC license)– check out the other people they have writing on intellectual property, communications, and the internets.

Obama in cyberspace

By James Boyle

For those stalwarts who lived through the Bush years in a thrall of horror and disbelief, broken only by Jon Stewart monologues, Barack Obama’s arrival has been cathartic. True, the sight of your retirement account statement may bring on nausea, chills and palpitations. (Is it really unrealistic to think of working until you are 70? As a bicycle messenger?) But there is always the soothing relief of hearing the announcement that yet another Bush policy has been overturned, even if the announcement generally comes with a pragmatic footnote. America is now against torture again. (But also against prosecuting those who tortured and against declassifying photos of abuse.) Guantánamo will be closed down. (Though we don’t know quite where the inhabitants will go.) The United States will do something about climate change. (Even though the actual plan is full of corporate giveaways.) The phrase ”Justice Department” no longer sounds like an oxymoron. And so on.

Sometimes the ”pragmatism” looks a little like ”not trying” – as when Obama scurried quickly into retreat on immunity for the telephone companies who participated, probably illegally, in spying on US citizens. But those who understand politics better than I give him fairly high marks on his combination of principle and pragmatism. And since I couldn’t craft a legislative majority at a dinner table over what Chinese food to order, I am reluctant to throw stones at those who have to deal with considerably more unwieldy coalitions.

So what does Obama’s mixture of principle and pragmatism look like in the world of the new economy, and more specifically, the world of intellectual property policy? The picture is definitely mixed. On the one hand, he has brought brilliant people to important positions. It is nice to have a Nobel prize-winner (Steven Chu) as Secretary of Energy, and another (Harold Varmus) as the Co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. It is hard to imagine the Obama team talking about science as if it were simply one inconvenient partisan position or ridiculing the ”evidence based mindset” or, for that matter, evolution itself. The administration has good ideas about what to do with the slow motion train-wreck that is the US Patent and Trademark Office. It is not clear if those good ideas will be implemented, but one can hope. In the area of copyright law . . . well, the signs are mixed.

Traditionally, Democratic administrations take their copyright policy direct from Hollywood and the recording industry. Unfortunately, so do Republican administrations. The capture of regulators by the industry they regulate is nothing new, of course, but in intellectual property there is the added benefit that incumbents can frequently squelch competing technologies and business methods before they ever come into existence. Years of making policy this way have given us retrospectively extended copyright terms that are in excess of 100 years. (Perpetual copyright ”on the instalment plan” in Peter Jaszi’s words.) It has given us a one-sided and unbalanced view of the world, which registers with complete accuracy the real dangers that the content industry faces from any new technology, while ignoring the benefits those same technologies can provide – including to the content industry. The Obama administration’s warm embrace of Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley’s chequebook, had given some hope that this pattern would change – and I think it will. Now, instead of taking copyright policy direct from the media conglomerates (who, after all, have a very legitimate point of view – even if not the only point of view) it is quite likely that the administration will construct it as a contract between content companies and high-technology companies such as Google. In some places, citizens and consumers will probably benefit, simply because optimising for the interests of two economic blocs rather than one is likely to give us a slightly more balanced, and less technology-phobic, set of rules. And perhaps the administration will go further. But recent actions make me doubt that this is the case.

First, the administration’s messages about the so-called copyright czar have left little doubt that it is the content industry that is going to be commanding the cossacks. (Would you really want to be called a “czar”? We don’t have a patent tyrant, or an antitrust dictator, so why a copyright czar? But I digress) The goal of the law that created this position is simple. It is to give unprecedented high-level governmental representation to the interests of a particular set of industries, so they can, ahem, help ensure that other agencies, such as the Justice Department put the appropriate resources and zeal into prosecuting DVD pirates and handbag counterfeiters. One wouldn’t want them to be confused about their priorities after all. (Even the Bush administration Justice Department, which historically thought nothing except gay marriage was constitutionally suspect, managed to perceive that this was a tad problematic if one believed in prosecutorial independence.) Obama isn’t responsible for this silly law. But he does control who fills the position. So far as I can tell, the debate has now shifted to precisely how dogmatic the representation of intellectual property holders should be. The idea that intellectual property policy might actually require a balance between multiple interests, including some who are not rights holders, has apparently been abandoned. If a few thoughtful scholars such as Larry Lessig get caricatured in the process, well, what’s the harm?

But the final straw may be the Obama administration’s opposition to a proposal on copyright exceptions for the visually impaired. About 95 per cent of books are not available for blind or partially sighted readers. Some countries have exceptions in their laws which, very sensibly, condition the grant of the copyright monopoly on a (very) few public interest limitations, such as the right to make non-commercial versions of works one has legally purchased in order to make them accessible to the visually impaired. (For example, generating a machine-readable audio book, or a Braille version, from a legally purchased digital text.) The proposal would generalise and harmonise those exceptions. It is backed by a number of developing countries and opposed – quietly – by the US and most of the European Union. Hip-deep in a colossal market failure on a global scale, they say optimistically that the market will provide an acceptable solution, though there is overwhelming empirical evidence that it will not.

Why oppose this proposal? Scaremongering aside, there is no real threat to anyone’s business model here. But if one sees any limitation of the most extreme version of copyright as a dangerous and ideologically driven attack on property itself, well then, one must fight. This proposal represents the ideas that rights should have limits and that we should harmonise limitations and exceptions as well as rights themselves. It is that principle, the principle of balance, that must be resisted. Even if it puts one in the embarrassing position of – ever so pragmatically – sacrificing one’s blind citizens to an industry agenda. In a world where we have to deal with torture and climate change and the collapse of our economic system, this little piece of moral cowardice is not something many people are going to notice. But it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, nonetheless.

James Boyle is a professor of law at Duke Law School. His most recent book is The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind.

以創用 CC 釋出的音樂是否就「無版權」?

Bob Chao (柏強), June 15, 2009 07:34 AM   License: 姓名標示-非商業性-相同方式分享 2.5 台灣

不是,不是不是。著作人使用創用CC條款,是將他的作品「授權」給你使用,並不代表作品就「無版權」。如果你違反著作人原先定下的條件 (例如姓名標示、相同方式分享等),則授權無效、你一樣是侵權。

所以推廣創用 CC 從來就不是反對著作權的作為。相反地,我們一定會說明一下著作權的部份,否則聽眾不會懂得 CC 的意義。

Open Government in UK, not in USA...

COMMUNIA, June 11, 2009 08:51 PM   License: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

"Making government information accessible and useful for the widest possible group of people" [11june09]

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COMMUNIA Conference: registration deadline approaching

COMMUNIA, June 09, 2009 11:31 PM   License: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Planning to attend the Second COMMUNIA International Conference 2009? Please do not forget to complete the online registration form by the 12th of June. For organizational reasons, we need to know the exact number of participants by the upcoming Friday 12 June 2009.

Also available are detailed procedures for hotel bookings (at special rates).

The Second COMMUNIA International Conference 2009 is scheduled for Sunday 28, Monday 29 & Tuesday 30 June 2009 in Torino, under the title "Global Science and the Economics of Knowledge-Sharing Institutions".

Please visit the Conference home page for further information and detailed programme. [9june09]

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Cine latinoamericano de Garage: cinepata.com

Carolina Botero, June 09, 2009 11:04 AM   License: Reconocimiento-No comercial-Compartir bajo la misma licencia 2.5 Colombia

En Chile realmente están pasando muchas cosas en temas de Propiedad Intelectual y eso hace que la gente se esté arriesgando cada vez más a romper el molde.

Cuando preparaba la conferencia del año pasado sobre acceso al audivisual en Colombia, dentro del evento de Mincultura, pensaba que hacía falta un sitio donde se exhibiera lo que sucedía en la región y que fuera una apuesta frontal para el acceso…

Este artículo en El Espectador me puso sobre la pista de cinepata.com el sitio del escritor Alberto Fuguet que “es un portal destinado a la descarga de películas digitales o en formato digital de manera gratuita a usuarios de todo el mundo. También es una de las casas donde se ubica el llamado cine-garage chileno y, de paso, el latinoamericano”.

Buscando sobre el sitio encontré lo que escribió hijodelmedio en donde indica que aún no hay un modelo de negocio para cinepata y que adhieren a la “filosofía Lessig”. Buscando en el sitio encontre en la sección “Preguntas más Preguntadas”:

¿Por cuánto tiempo estará on-line un filme? ¿los derechos son para Chile?
Cada pieza audiovisual, sea un largo o un clip, estará “por siempre” on-line. Los derechos se cederán a Cinepata.com para el mundo entero pues la red llega a todo el mundo. Se recomendará que cada item tenga el sello de Creative Commons. Una vez en la red es claro que la gente podrá verla en su computador, TV, iPod o celular, hasta podrán quemar dvds. Esas son las reglas de la red y Cinepata.com las entiende. Cinepata.com desea ser una “multisala de cine indie virtual” ordenado, con una cierta ética y estética, que ordene algo de aquel gran caos que está en la red.

Como ven se trata de una aproximación de acceso, de difusión… ahora habra que ver el contenido, pero desde acá los mejores éxitos para cinepata.com, espero que el modelo de negocio surja pronto para apoyar al sitio y a los realizadores latinoamericanos.

IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library

COMMUNIA, June 06, 2009 05:29 PM   License: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Free public domain music scores and/or sheet music library. [06june09]

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Stuart Shieber's New Blog - Occasional Pamphlet

Michael Carroll, June 05, 2009 09:16 PM   License: Attribution 2.5 Generic

Stuart Shieber, Professor and Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication at Harvard,has started an open access blog, The Occasional Pamphlet. Stuart was responsible for shepherding the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences Open Access policy through the process. Stuart cares deeply about getting the architecture right for digital scholarly communication, and he has a number of creative ideas about how to move to a more open and productive environment for scholarly communication. Welcome Stuart!

@ the British Library, July 22

John Wilbanks, June 01, 2009 07:32 PM   License: Attribution 3.0 Unported

I'm happy to say that I'll be doing a forum at the British Library on July 22, called Scientific Findings in a Digital World: What is the Genuine Article? There's a Nature Network group you can join to participate in the creation of the agenda.

This is pretty cool. The British Library is a legendary institution, and has some personal resonance for me too - my dad wrote a big chunk of his dissertation in the reading room there. I'll make a few introductory comments and then do my best Oprah impersonation.

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Podcast on Cloud of Data

John Wilbanks, June 01, 2009 02:13 PM   License: Attribution 3.0 Unported

Paul Miller and I recorded a chat last week that's now online as a podcast from Cloud of Data.

Paul is a smart guy and it was a fun interview. We first met when he was working with Talis, which is a very progressive company in the UK (they sponsored some of the development of the PDDL and currently host data in the public domain for free in the Talis Connected Commons) but he's now out freelancing. Check out the podcast and let me know your comments.

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Cadyou, cad & 3D open-archive

Lorenzo de Tomasi, June 01, 2009 08:00 AM   License: Attribuzione-Condividi allo stesso modo 2.5 Italia

Cadyou is a community launched by Tom Moor in late 2008 whose goal is to create an archive of free, high quality 3D and CAD files for everyone to use, available in the Public Domain and under Creative Commons licenses. One interesting component of Cadyou’s content is its moderation policy: Unlike ...

Conjectured impact of Wikipedia license interoperability?

Mike Linksvayer, May 31, 2009 09:45 PM   License: CC0 1.0 Universal

Wikipedians voted overwhelmingly against kryptonite — for using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) as the main content license for Wikipedias and their sibling projects, permitting these to incorporate work offered under CC BY-SA, the main non-software copyleft license used outside of Wikipedia, and other CC BY-SA licensed projects to incorporate content from Wikipedia. The addition of CC BY-SA to Wikimedia sites should happen in late June and there is an outreach effort to encourage non-Wikimedia wikis under the Free Documentation License (FDL; usually chosen for Wikipedia compatibility) to also migrate to CC BY-SA by August 1.

This change clearly ought to over time increase the proportion of content licensed under free-as-in-freedom copyleft licenses. More content licensed under a single or interoperable copyleft licenses increases the reasons to cooperate with that regime — to offer new work under the dominant copyleft license (in the non-software case, now unambiguously CC BY-SA) in order to have access to content under that regime — and decreases the reasons to avoid copylefted work, one of which is the impossibility of incorporating works under multiple and incompatible copyleft licenses (when relying on the permissions of those licenses, modulo fair use). Put another way, the unified mass and thus gravitational pull of the copylefted content body is about to increase substantially.

Sounds good — but what can we expect from the actual impact of making legally interoperable the mass of Free Culture and its exemplar, Wikipedia? How can we gauge that impact, short of access to a universe where Wikipedians reject CC BY-SA? A few ideas:

(1) Wikimedia projects will be dual licensed after the addition of CC BY-SA — content will continue to be available under the FDL, until CC BY-SA content is mixed in, at which point the article or other work in question is only available under CC BY-SA. One measure of the licensing change’s direct impact on Wikimedia projects would be the number and proportion of CC BY-SA-only articles over time, assuming an effort to keep track.

I suspect it will take a long time (years?) for a non-negligible proportion of Wikipedia articles to be CC BY-SA-only, i.e., to have directly incorporated external CC BY-SA content. However, although most direct, this is probably the least significant impact of the change, and my suspicion could be upset if other impacts (below) turn out to be large, creating lots of CC BY-SA content useful for incorporating into Wikipedia articles.

(2) Content from Wikipedias and other Wikimedia projects could be incorporated in non-Wikimedia projects more. The difficulty here is measurement, but given academic interest in Wikipedia and the web generally, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the requisite data sets (historical and ongoing) and expertise brought together to analyze the use of Wikimedia project content elsewhere over time. Note that a larger than expected (there’s the rub) increase in such use could be the result of CC BY-SA being more straightforward for users than the FDL (indeed, a major reason for the change) as much or more than the result of license interoperability.

(3) New and existing projects could adopt or switch to CC BY-SA when they otherwise wouldn’t have in order to gain compatibility with Wikimedia projects. One sure indication of this would involve major projects using a CC license with a “noncommercial” term switching to CC BY-SA and giving interoperability with Wikipedia as the reason for the switch. Another indicator would simply be an increase in the use of CC BY-SA (and even more permissive instruments such as CC BY and CC0, to the extent the motivation is primarily to create content that can be used in Wikipedia rather than to use content from Wikipedia) relative to more restrictive (and non-interoperable with Wikipedia) licenses.

(4) Apart from needing to be compatible with Wikipedia because one desires to incorporate its content, one might want to be compatible with Wikipedia because it is “cool” to be so. I don’t know that this has occurred on a significant scale to this date, so if it begins to one possible factor in such a development would be the change to CC BY-SA. How could this be? As cool as Wikipedia compatibility sounds, having to adopt a hard to understand license intended for software documentation (the FDL) makes attaining this coolness seem infeasible. Consideration of the FDL just hasn’t been on the radar of many outside of the spaces of documentation, encyclopedias, and perhaps educational materials, while consideration and oftentimes use of CC licenses is active in many segments. However, in most of these more restrictive CC licenses (i.e., those prohibiting commercial use or adaptation) are most popular. So if we see an upsurge in the use of CC BY-SA for popular culture works (music, film) the beginning of which coincides with the Wikimedia licensing change, it may not be unreasonable to guess that the latter caused the former.

(5) The weight of Wikipedia and relative accessibility of CC BY-SA could further consensus that the freedoms demanded by Wikimedia projects are some combination of “good”, “correct”, “moral”, and “necessary” — if some of these can be distinguished from “cool”. In the long term, this could be indicated by the sidelining of terms for content that do not qualify as free and open, as they have been for software, where and similar obvious competitors for important free software niches are strategically irrelevant.

Obviously 3, 4, and 5 overlap somewhat.

(6) I conjecture that making more cultural production more wiki-like (or to gain WikiNature) is probably the biggest determinant of the success of Free Culture. More interplay between the Wikipedia, both the most significant free culture project and the most significant wiki, and the rest of the free culture and open content universe can only further this trend — though I have no idea how to measure the possible impact of the licensing change here, and wouldn’t want to ascribe too much weight to it.

(7) Last, the attention of the Wikipedia community ought to have a positive impact on the quality of future versions of Creative Commons licenses (there shouldn’t be another version until 2011 or so, and hopefully there won’t be another version after that for much longer). Presumably Wikipedians also would have had a positive impact on future versions of the FDL, but arguably less so given the Free Software Foundation’s (excellent) focus on software freedom.

Will any of the above play out in a significant way? How much will it be reasonable to attribute to the license change? Will researchers bother to find out? Here’s to hoping!

Prior to the Wikipedia community vote on adopting CC BY-SA it crossed my mind to set up several play money prediction market contracts concerning the above outcomes conditioned on Wikipedia adopting CC BY-SA by August 1, 2009, for which I did set up a contract. It is just as well that I didn’t — or rather if I had, I would have had to heavily promote all of the contracts in order to stimulate any play trading — the basic adoption contract at this point hasn’t budged from 56% since the vote results were announced, which means nobody is paying attention to the contract on Hubdub.

Yahoo Brings CC Filters to Image Search

Lorenzo de Tomasi, May 31, 2009 04:00 PM   License: Attribuzione-Condividi allo stesso modo 2.5 Italia

On May 26th, 2009, on Yahoo’s Search Blog, Polly Ng and Anuj Sahai announced the addition of CC license image filtering options to their image search and also explained why CC licenses are so important for finding images online. Finding a great image online elicits a little thrill, but it ...

Video of talk online...

John Wilbanks, May 28, 2009 08:22 PM   License: Attribution 3.0 Unported

So, I was supposed to go up to Montreal and Ottawa the past couple of days, but a series of miserable luck in terms of planes made it unworkable (it's complicated).

Instead, I tried to record a presentation and get it onto the web so we could play it for them, and then take questions by skype. That also didn't work.

However, we were successful in the end getting the video online. So if you're interested in what I say when I talk to the libraries, but haven't been to one of the conferences where I've spoken, take a look.

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Digg adopts CC0

John Wilbanks, May 27, 2009 09:10 PM   License: Attribution 3.0 Unported

As noted on the Creative Commons blog, the folks at Digg have converted to CC0 (replacing a multiyear use of a different public domain legal tool).

This is very cool on lots of levels. But Daniel Burka of Digg said it best, so I'll make this a short post by simply quoting him...

This is good for the internet and good for society.

He's talking about the public domain, and he's right.

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The Public Domain wins Donald McGannon Award

James Boyle, May 26, 2009 07:06 PM   License: Attribution 3.0 Unported

I was zooming through my inbox in a deleting frenzy, discarding winsome offers from Russian ingenues, fabulous commercial opportunities in the Nigerian oil business and hundreds of prizes that I had apparently won without entering.  The next e-mail was another “Congratulations — You have won..” and I nearly deleted it too.  Luckily I didn’t because it was the announcement that The Public Domain had won the Donald McGannon Book Award for 2008.   The Award goes to books in the field of communications policy, liberally construed. (The McGannon Center also listed Jonathan Zittrain’s excellent The Future of the Internet as “an honored book.”) Here are a few of the prior winners…

Daniel J. Solove, The Future of Reputation, Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, C. Edwin Baker, Media, Markets, and Democracy, Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau. Privacy on the Line, Tom Streeter, Selling the Air..

If you just bought the last 20 years of McGannon award winners, you’d have a really good library on communications policy.  Being on that list is an honour.

Videos from Open Innovation Conference at NESTA

James Boyle, May 26, 2009 05:24 PM   License: Attribution 3.0 Unported

Britain’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) had a conference last week on open innovation in culture and science.  I got to set the stage but the other talks… were far more interesting. My colleague Jennifer Jenkins led off the panel on Open Innovation in the Creative Industries — in which she gave a fascinating description of the ways in which creators in publishing, music and film are using Creative Commons licenses as part of their business plans.  (The responses to her talk are hilarious.)  John Wilbanks was inspiring as he described what Science Commons has done — and what it could do.  And the panel on Open Innovation and science which featured Nobel Laureate, Sir John Sulston, is well worth watching.

Arabic comics (under CC) that rock!

Donatella Della Ratta, May 25, 2009 10:11 PM   License: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States


While off in Beirut, I had the great chance on saturday to take part to the live 24/24 hours comics marathon Grand Papier.  I was in Hatem’s cosy flat in Hamra, West Beirut. Hatem is one of the artists who have founded Samandal, the Lebanese comics magazine (online and hardcopy) that is released under Creative Commons license.

This was the great atmosphere I’ve found over there:

samandal2

samandal3 samandal6

The marathon featured online contributions from different cities in the world, like Beirut, Brussels, Paris, Montreal, even Papetee. Everybody was connected thru a webcam

samandal8

Everybody was invited to write his/her own story starting from a common picture posted online, and everybody worked out something according to his/her style and fantasy.

samandal samandal11

Samandal’s folks are not new to these extravangances. They are the first ones who organised a remix party, encouraging the invited artists to play with their works released under Creative Commons, doing cut up and re-publishing the stuff.

The comics feature different Arab artists, who write stories both in Arabic and French or English. Great strips can be found from countries that you would never have imagined, like the Dubai hyppie series, coming from UAE and describing in an hilarious way the daily life of a young Emirati; or like the manga strips, Japanese way, perfectly re-designed by young veiled ladies living in Lebanese refugee camps.

Samandal can be found on the Internet and it is also distributed in a very cool hardcopy edition available all over the places in Beirut (including the airport) and some other Arab countries. The team is very open to submissions coming from all across the Arab world. Next deadline is on 31st may.

Thanks to the Samandal’s folks for having invited me to the marathon and for doing such a cool thing under CC.

samandal7

Wikipedia goes Creative Commons BY-SA!

Donatella Della Ratta, May 22, 2009 04:34 PM   License: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States


After a consultation vote held in the past few weeks within its worlwide community, Wikipedia has finally voted in favour of publishing its content under the Creative Commons BY-SA license.

This is a great news that contributes even further to foster the cooperation among organisations as Free Software Foundation, Wikimedia Foundation and Creative Commons and to create a larger worldwide community who cares about knowledge sharing and culture. Mabrouk to everybody!

This is the press release coming from the Wikimedia Foundation:

May 21, 2009

San Francisco, California — Earlier today the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees passed a resolution that will bring about significant changes to the way the content of the Wikimedia Foundation projects, including Wikipedia, will be licensed. This resolution follows a vote among the international Wikimedia community. More than 17,000 votes were cast, with strongest participation in English, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Polish, Italian, and Chinese. 88% of all voters who expressed an opinion supported the change.

All Wikimedia content can be used for any purpose, as long as proper credit is given and modifications are made available under the same terms. This open access approach to copyright is supported using a license which explicitly grants everyone those freedoms. The decision will result in all of the Wikimedia Foundation’s projects moving from the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) to the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA) as their primary content license. The GFDL, which has served Wikipedia since its inception, will continue to be supported where possible, but not to the detriment of interoperability.

The licensing change means that all Wikimedia project content will be more interoperable with existing CC-BY-SA content and easier to re-use. “The volunteers who work on Wikimedia projects have very strongly supported making their contributions available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA) in addition to the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL),” said Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Chair, Michael Snow. “Updating our license terms will support Wikimedia’s charitable mission, by making our projects legally compatible with others that have chosen the CC-BY-SA license. Our free information and educational content can be shared more readily and will be easier for everyone to use.”

Wikipedia has historically been licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, which was developed for software documentation by the Free Software Foundation, a non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman, with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom and to defend the rights of all free software users. At the time of Wikipedia’s inception in 2001, it was one of the few licenses available for works other than software which focused on granting freedoms to re-use and re-distribute information.

Since their creation in 2002, the Creative Commons licenses have provided a practical and simple means for authors to choose licenses that grant broader freedoms than publication under normal copyright. They have since seen strong adoption in science, education, photography, music, and many other areas. Major search engines, photo sharing sites like Flickr, universities, archives and libraries have all begun supporting the Creative Commons licensing model, and the idea of a culture which grants broad freedoms to remix and re-use information has become mainstream.

Lawrence Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons, offered the following comment on the announcement of the licensing decision: “Richard Stallman’s commitment to the cause of free culture has been an inspiration to us all. Assuring the interoperability of free culture is a critical step towards making this freedom work. The Wikipedia community is to be congratulated for its decision, and the Free Software Foundation thanked for its help. I am enormously happy about this decision.”

Because Wikipedia’s license was chosen by project founder Jimmy Wales when Creative Commons hadn’t yet been created, Wikipedia’s early commitment to free sharing and free re-use has actually worked against legal interoperability. Moreover, because the GNU FDL was designed for software documentation, some of its requirements (such as the requirement to include a copy of the license text with each copy) have encumbered re-use of Wikipedia content. The licensing update was possible because the Free Software Foundation agreed to modify the GNU Free Documentation License in November last year.

As the decision to re-license was approved by both the Wikimedia volunteer community and the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, the organization is now taking steps to update all its licensing terms through June. With the dual-license system in place, content can be be further re-used under either the GFDL or the CC-BY-SA license, but the GFDL will be dropped from content objects where this is necessary to support remixing it with existing CC-BY-SA content.

Wikimedia aprueba la migración de licencias

Carolina Botero, May 22, 2009 08:47 AM   License: Reconocimiento-No comercial-Compartir bajo la misma licencia 2.5 Colombia

Traducción del blog de CC

… Hace un rato blogueamos sobre los resultados de la votación de la comunidad Wikipedia en agregar la licencia CC BY- SA. Más del 75 % de votos fueron a favor de aprobar este cambio, pero como ha indicado la Fundación Wikimedia, el Diputado Director Erik Moeller y la miembro de consejo Kat Walsh, este número subestima el nivel de apoyo al cambio pueto que el 14 % votaron “ninguna opinión”, mientras sólo el 10 % se opuso.

En todo caso estamos profundamente satisfechos de que una mayoría tan aplastante (el 88 % de aquellos que votaron opinando) aprobaron este en el que se viene trabajando desde hace varios años por la Fundación de Softwaer LIbre, la Fundación Wikimedia, y Creative Commons. CC está orgulloso de estar con estas reputadas organizaciones y cumplirá con la confianza depositada.

La adición de la licencia CC BY SA a los sitios Wikimedia debe ocurrir durante el próximo mes. Ahora es un tiempo bueno para comenzar a pensar en si sus trabajos y proyectos deberían interactuar con Wikipedia. Si usted usa (o cambie a) CC BY SA, el contenido puede fluir en ambas direcciones (su trabajo podría ser incorporado en Wikipedia, y usted puede incorporar el contenido de Wikipedia en su trabajo). Si usted usa CC BY o CC0, su trabajo podría ser incorporado en Wikipedia, pero no viceversa. Si su trabajo no está licenciado, o está bajo una licencia de CC con elemento no comercial o sin obras derivadas (NC o ND), nada puede fluir en ninguna dirección, excepto por el “fair use” o haciendo uso de una excepción o limitación del copyright.

COMMUNIA Network Enlargement #2: Call for Application

COMMUNIA, May 22, 2009 03:40 AM   License: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

The application process for ten new network members is now open.

Network members are expected to attend the official COMMUNIA workshops and conferences, to participate on a voluntary basis in working groups of their interest (and the corresponding meetings, if any), and, more in general, to share their experience, knowledge and contacts to promote the advancement of the understanding of the role of the public domain in our societies.

Application deadline: 10 June 2009 at 18:00 CET [21May09]

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Lessig on Helprin

Michael Carroll, May 21, 2009 05:40 PM   License: Attribution 2.5 Generic

There's a cottage industry of naysayers who seek attention by deriding all things Internet. A member of this crew, Mark Helprin, has put together a collection of pages bound together under the title Digital Barbarism which was printed by Harper Collins. I say printed rather than published because the book could not have passed through any meaningful peer review or editorial process. It appears that at least in this case, Harper has decided that its future is as a vanity press.

In the book, Helprin presents a largely fictional account of copyright law and takes some pot shots at Creative Commons along the way. If you happen to come across someone who has been taken in by Helprin's account, please refer them to Larry Lessig's meticulous refutation of Helprin.

Royal Film Commission/Creative Commons workshop in Amman going great

Donatella Della Ratta, May 21, 2009 10:05 AM   License: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States


I am currently out in Amman, fourth day of the online media creativity workshop, the join effort between Royal Film Commission of Jordan and Creative Commons.

The students are great, very active and creative and I think everybody is enjoying the training. Joi (Ito), CEO of Creative Commons, is teaching the students how to use online tools to create stuff and promote it. He has been a great teacher, full of passion and energy -as usual!-. Since he is also a great photographer, he has put a lot of nice pics on his Flickr photostream. He also wrote a very nice post on his blog and I’d love to thank him too, for all the energy he put in this and also for the fun we all had in the past days. Thanks also to the students, the SAE people and the great staff of Royal Film Commission, Mohannad and Nada that made this possible and Mais who is our angel..

For who’s interested to follow live we set up a blog and Twitter tagged with#rfconlinemedia.

RFCworkshoprfc2

Now, This Is Open Innovation

John Wilbanks, May 20, 2009 02:49 PM   License: Attribution 3.0 Unported

This was in the comments from my blog post on Pfizer's semi-open innovation. I don't normally highlight comments like this, but sometimes you have to give credit where credit is due.

Why deal with Pfizer in the first place? Anything you might find they'll keep and you're SOL. We have a compound library that started from 1.4 million cmpds from Chemdiv, Chembridge, Maybridge and Tripos. I talked them into using our exclusion criteria (developed by my old buddies from Pharmacia - we all got Pfired when Pfizer took over Kazoo) and got rid of all the junk we didn't want (1 million). From there we used a "molecular equivalence" program to pick only unique compounds that we wanted to purchase - 100,000. I built my own library of off-patent FDA approved drugs (except opiods and benzo's). You can come to us with your screen and run it against our library of 10,00 (select set) or 100,000 full set and you get to keep whatever you find. No IP issues. Check us out.

This is why I love blogging. The writer is from the Michigan High Throughput Screening Center. And I think I've found a poster child for the Health Commons.

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(Semi) Open Innovation @ Pfizer

John Wilbanks, May 19, 2009 11:12 PM   License: Attribution 3.0 Unported

I ran into Virginia Acha last week at the NESTA event in London, but she didn't tell me about this!

Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline notes that Pfizer is apparently allowing external companies to screen against their internal library.

But I'm told that Pfizer has been meeting with several other (mostly smaller) companies, offering their (entire?) compound library as a screening resource. As I understand it, you need to come to them with a reasonably formatted HTS assay, and there's a fee in the high hundreds of thousands to run the screen.

This isn't all the way towards open innovation. In a true open innovation sense, the fees and the barriers would be lower, as the goal would be to maximize dealflow. But that probably means, as Derek also notes, that the IP issues aren't settled.

Should anyone involved want to talk about how to settle those issues, we'd be interested in hearing about how this process is working out.

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Open Data Guide @ OKF

John Wilbanks, May 19, 2009 05:52 AM   License: Attribution 3.0 Unported

Open Knowledge Foundation have released a short guide to open data as part of the open data commons project.

I have my philosophical disagreements with OKF on some issues - and they with me! - but they're the kind of disagreements that come from people on the same side of the fence. We all want open data, and we want it now.

Moments like this are good to step back and focus on our agreements. We agree that data is a little weird, and that we need more research on how to best treat the law around the data. We agree that public sector information needs to be free - in fact, Rufus Pollock has written some essential work on the subject. And I'm proud to serve on the OKF advisory board (here's hoping they're as glad to have me).

So let this be a word of warning to those who think there is a "split" on open data - there isn't. There may be a lot of passionate back and forth, but it's a matter of degree, not of difference. Congrats to the OKF for the Open Data Commons project and the beginnings that the guide represents.

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