iCommons received core grant funding:

2008 also marks the start of a five-year grant by two new trusts: Kusuma Trust and IETSI (International Electronic Trade and Services Initiative) that have made an endowment to iCommons of $1 million over a period of five years. The power of this core grant cannot be overemphasised. Anyone working in the non-profit field will recognise how difficult it is to raise core funds, and as a young organisation based in the developing world, iCommons is extremely grateful for this opportunity to consolidate and build an organisation that will have considerable impact into the future.

[Creative Commons » CC News] LugRadio to switch to CC-BY-SA:

Incidentally, the LugRadio podcast has been working to effect a switch from the most restrictive CC license (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives) to one of the most liberal (Attribution-ShareAlike) and this month made the announcement in the form of an essay, well worth reading.

[Creative Commons » CC News] ACLU Embraces CC Licensing

The ACLU has begun its first foray into CC licensing, releasing all the content from their new website, marijuanaconversation.org, under a CC BY-NC-ND license.

Oh and Lessig isn’t going to run for Congress, in case you missed it…

OCLN is a regular feature here at opencontentlawyer.

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Puerto Rico launched their Creative Commons ports today, making PR the 44th port of the CC set of licences. CC announcement. CC Puerto Rico site.

Two new jurisdiction specific CC licences on their way as Norwegian and Ecuadorian draft Creative Commons licences are now available for comment. Ecuador. Norway. CC Announcement.

Queensland to use Creative Commons licences for public sector information, and the Australian federal government may soon follow suit. Guardian coverage.

New CCZero framework

Based in part on comments on CCZero such as those I’ve outlined here, Creative Commons is to change course and take a new approach for CCZero inspired by Open Data Commons and the Public Domain Dedication and Licence.

CC and free cultural works.

Creative Commons licences now distinguish which ones are compatible with “free cultural works” definition. They have a snazzy new logo on the CC licences that match the FCW definition, which would be the Attribution (CC-BY) and Attribution Share Alike (CC-BY-SA) licences.

The Open Gaming License is apparently getting a redraft. The Open Gaming License is used for Dungeon and Dragons.

Open content and business links

A new paper on the creative industries and small and medium sized businesses is out (via openbusiness.cc) Phase Three – The New Entrepreneurial Economy (February 2008) subtitle: The New Artisan Economy. I’d blockquote an excerpt of it, but the PDF file has technological restrictions on it.

Kevin Kelly and free. Kevin Kelly has some thoughts on internet distribution and content:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

Food for thought, especially given Chris Anderson’s move to FREE looking at the same area for his new book (more on the long tail blog).

And in related news..

In case you missed the facebook group or the new webiste, Lawrence Lessig, whose name is almost synonymous with Creative Commons licences, is very seriously considering running for US Congress.

OCLN is a regular feature here at opencontentlawyer.

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Lessig announced this week on his blog that the public US caselaw resources that Public Resource has been working towards has now gone live:

As announced at public.resource.org, CC and public.resource.org have announced the first release of material to support our free law project. After raising a large chunk of change from great and generous sorts like David Boies, John Gilmore, the Omidyar Network and the Elbaz Foundation, we’ve purchased a database of a substantial part of all federal cases. Carl’s team has now made all the data available in a beautiful, xml format for developers to take and use however they want. The however they want part is what’s assured by the CCØ mark on all cases — no rights, including attribution rights, are asserted over these data at all. Free law available for anyone to build search engines, or collections, or whatever else they want.

They’ve released the material under the beta version of CCZero, but note that CCZero has still not been officially launched or its use encouraged. At the public.resource.org site you can find the case law and materials and the developer file.

New Creative Commons and commons (more broadly defined) research discuss list. The list is run by Giorgos Cheliotis, who has done some really interesting research on measuring use of CC [PDF abstract link] [blog post].

And in related news…

NESTA report “Beyond the creative industries: mapping the creative economy in the United Kingdom” [PDF Link]. This looks like it could be part of the evidence base for the upcoming Gowers Copyright Exceptions consultation.

Google’s Canada Policy Counsel answers the question, “What is a balanced approach to copyright reform?“.

The European Commission is looking to push the term in copyright sound recordings up to 95 years. [EC press release] [IPKat commentary].

43(B)log has lots of coverage to the recent Columbia Fair Use conference.

New academic paper on servitudes that includes comparison to free and open source software licences and Creative Commons / open content licensing:

In this article I develop a comprehensive account of the evolving jurisprudence of servitudes as applied to both land and personal property, identifying the sources of traditional servitude skepticism in order better to evaluate the new generation of running restrictions on intangible informational goods. I apply the lessons I draw from the old servitudes to paradigmatic examples of contemporary licensing practices – including Microsoft end-user license agreements, the Free Software Foundation’s General Public License, and Creative Commons licenses.

Van Houweling, Molly Shaffer, “The New Servitudes” . Georgetown Law Journal, Forthcoming Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1028947

Discussion from University of Chicago, and hat tip to Madisonian.

OCLN is a regular feature here at opencontentlawyer.

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Report on Ordnance Survey licensing practices. Free Our Data covers in this post the report from the Commons Select Committee on Communities and Local Government looking into Ordnance Survey’s licensing and business model. From the report recommendations:

The fact that Ordnance Survey has included clauses in licences that effectively require competitors not to compete with it or to complain about it provides a clear example of why both private sector and governmental organisations sometimes perceive it to be acting uncompetitively and unfairly. No such condition should again be included in any licence.

Ordnance Survey is Britain’s national mapping agency.

Podcast with John Wilbanks. The head of Science Commons talks with Ellen Duranceau of MIT Libraries News about SC and open data.

Duncan Bucknell interviews Jeremy Phillips. The topic: “IP issues are business issues“.

IP addresses and personal data. Of particular interest to EU readers, the EU Law Blog discusses Case C-275/06 Promusicae v. Telefónica, which is about the interaction between personal data, file sharing, copyright enforcement, and rightsholders requesting information from ISPs.

Selling abandoned CDs as a crime. Patry covers the US case of United States v. Chalupnik, 2008 WL 268997 (8th Cir. Feb. 1, 2008), court’s docket no. 07-1355 where a postal worker took rubbish CDs (probably in both senses of the term) and sold them.

And some fun things…

Open Source magic. Via the CC Blog, The Art of Magical Words uses a CC licence for part of the book on how to create spells.

OCLN is a regular feature here at opencontentlawyer.

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EU Public Licence. On the software side of things, Technollama reports on the new European Union Public Licnece, said to be GPL compatible.

Ford releases photos under CC-BY, and then promptly changes them to CC-BY-NC [via CC weblog]. Because CC licences are irrevocable, anyone downloading the original CC-BY can still use it under those term.

Some thoughts on p2p production and guilds via Open Business. As your users form part of your infrastructure (such as FON), you’ll have to start thinking differently about how you legally manage your relationships with them.

Florida schools are using CC-licensed content [via iterating towards openness]. The licence is CC-BY-SA and the site is wiki-based freereading.net.

What a copyright troll looks like. PK discusses copyright trolls. Could we see lots more copyright infringement lawsuits in the near future? If so, maybe more content available under an open content licence will be the result.

And just for fun…

A Peruvian dancer in Chile claims IP over Peruvian dance via Technollama. Not clear what kind of IP involved, but an interesting claim nonetheless.

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ACIA in Taiwan

People are posting about the meeting on the 19-20 in Taiwan of ACIA: the International Workshop on Asia and Commons in the Information Age, including Terry Fischer’s keynote “Solutions to the copyright crisis,”…

in which he sought to combine legal reforms and business models with digital technologies that compensate creators while enabling cultural and economic benefits.

Creative Commons story

COMMUNIA

Technollama reports back on the COMMUNIA workshop last week, including Séverine Dussolier’s interesting concept of a “positive public domain”. Hopefully we’ll see more about this idea.

Open education

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration announced this week has a call for open licences:

Second, we call on educators, authors, publishers and institutions to release their resources openly. These open educational resources should be freely shared through open licences which facilitate use, revision, translation, improvement and sharing by anyone.

Iterating Toward Openness has a collection of press around the declaration.

Other interesting bits

Scarcity vs scale: Some thoughts on business models for museums and online content from electronic museum.

Somewhere along the line we’ll understand the importance of embracing rather than denying the proliferation of copying, pasting, borrowing. To get there we need to be better at understanding what value is, and that’s hard.

Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data via WIRED. What “open source” licences will they be using?

Madisonian.net comments on law prof blogs and the use of Creative Commons licences.

Recent academic articles

O’Sullivan, Maureen. “Creative Commons and contemporary copyright: A fitting shoe or “a load of old cobblers“?” First Monday [Online], Volume 13 Number 1 (13 January 2008).

OCLN is a regular feature here at opencontentlawyer.

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CCZero legal tools and text launched.

Creative Commons launched its new tool, CCZero (BETA) for comment.

Detailed commentary:

Dissecting CCZero – opencontentlawyer.com

More on CC0 — cc through the looking glass

1st COMMUNIA International Workshop Technology and the Public Domain

Happening today, 18 January 2008.

I wasn’t able to make it, but I know that the technollama will be there, and I’m anxious to see the blog posts and reports from him and others. Speakers today include Jonathan Gray (Open Knowledge Foundation), Nathan Yergler (Creative Commons), Kaitlin Thaney (Science Commons), Rob Davies (ePSIplus Thematic Network), Robert Horvitz (Open Spectrum Foundation), and Rishab Ghosh (MERIT, University of Maastricht).

Library of Congress (US) partners with Flickr for public domain content

The LOC hopes to both make their content more widely available and to get added information about their collection by opening it for comment through having users identify places and people in the photos.

Announcement on the Library of Congress blog.
LOC Flickr project FAQ
Flickr ‘s announcement.

Lessig’s book “The Future of Ideas” now available under a CC-BY-NC license

This means that all of his books now have CC licences. In case you were wondering, there were no CC licences when it was first published (autumn 2001). Read it here.

Lessig blog post.
Creative Commons announcement.

Creative Business Seminars now open for registration

The seminars, aimed at artists and creative entrepreneurs who want to make the most of the opportunities presented by the internet, will take place in March in central London and the deadline for applications is 15 February. Suw and Michael of the Open Rights Group together with yours truly (I’ve been working on the legal materials) have put together an event aimed at writers, musicians, film and video makers, visual artists, and others in (or interested in) the content creation industry.

Register and more information on the Creative Business in the Digital Era (CBDE) site.
Also see the ORG announcement.

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