Creative Commons is Six

Creative Commons Sticker on My MacBook ProIt’s hard to believe, but the Creative Commons project is 6 today. The project grew out of the battles over copyright and just after the licenses were released I wrote about it and all the content on this site has been under a Creative Commons license since then. That’s over 350 posts that anyone is freely able to share as long as they give me credit and don’t use it for commercial purpose. The genius of the CC project is that it appeals to our generosity in making it easier to share and find things that we can legally use to create new works. One of the things that initially made me excited about sharing photos on Flickr was the ease at adding CC licensing to your uploads very easily. Now I’m sharing 7,333 photos that are all under an Attribution-Noncommercial license, so if you want to use any photo you can if you give me credit and don’t sell it. There are almost 13 million photos on Flickr with the same licence and millions more under other CC licenses.
To put my money where my mouth is, I’ve also joined the Creative Commons network which gives me an OpenID and a page that lets people know about the works that I’ve licensed (as well as a t-shirt, a sticker, and a cool USB stick with songs by Jonathan Coulton on it). If you create work I would encourage you to think about licensing it and if you look at photos, or video, read things online, or listen to music or audio, you can search and find almost anything that you legally share, remix and reuse. It’s a wonderful new world thanks to the Creative Commons project and I’m proud and happy to be part of it.

December 16, 2008 ,

Five Years of Creative Commons

cc.logo.circle.pngFive years ago today things changed online in the copyfight. Frustration with the increasingly hostile environment surrounding intellectual property and a fundamental shift in copyright law in the United States, a brilliant and positive initiative called Creative Commons launched. It shifted things around by not asking “how can I stop people from stealing things?,” but by asking “how I can I share what I make and work with others?” With a set of licenses that were legal as well human and machine readable, an amazing amount of creativity and collaboration became possible.
This blog had started a few months before the launch in December of 2002 and I licensed all my blog posts from that point on. Now I have 331 posts that can be shared and remixed as long as it’s noncommercial and I’ve given credit. All of my 6,547 public photos on Flickr have the same license. The 10 episodes of the Bad Metaphor podcast are also licensed and everything that I create and put online will be licensed in a similar way.
It’s been a positive and encouraging experience to use the licenses as I’ve been able to meet and work with people from all over the world because of the project. The more that you give and share, the more you get back.

Continue…

December 15, 2007 ,

CC:365

There is a lot of great Creative Commons licensed music out there, but it can be hard to find things that you like. Grant Robertson started a podcast at the beginning of this year called CC:365 where every day for a year he would post a CC-licensed song. I listened from the beginning and wrote a fan letter and then found out that Grant was moving up to Halifax, which is close to me and where I work every day. Things were rolling along quite well, but after 142 days and 143 songs (one was a preview) there was a bit of a break and Grant asked for help with the podcast and I eagerly jumped in and now there are 5 people doing it as a team that rotates the awesome power and responsibility of picking songs. I’m coming up to the end of my first round of picks and I love it. I’ve been able to convince three new people to officially release Creative Commons licensed tracks, so I feel as if I’ve really accomplished something. Now I have about a month to come up with another seven picks, so I’ve got to keep looking.
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July 4, 2006 , ,

One Thousand Photos

Film on a ReelI just uploaded a photo to Flickr that brings the size of my archive to one thousand photos. That’s a lot and it confirms my belief that Flickr is a killer app. It’s actually changed the way that I think about photos and I’m taking a lot more. There are many ways to upload and share photos, but what makes Flickr great is the social component. When I started uploading pictures I was thinking that it was a great way to share photos with my family as it just didn’t make any more sense to keep emailing the same photos around all of the time. The other thing is that I didn’t want to upload photos of the kids and family events for the world. Sharing pictures with the family worked great, but it wasn’t until I started getting comments on my public photos and started participating in groups that I really started to get more heavily addicted.
What is wonderful about Flickr is that you can connect with people from around the world and communicate visually. You find people who have a similar visual sensibility to you. Now if someone adds me as a contact I look at their photos to try and figure out why. Usually it only takes a few images to figure out what you share in common, whether it is an interest in things that are rusting, similar framing or topics. I look forward to seeing the images that my contacts have uploaded and I want to share more.
The other thing that this sharing has encouraged me to do is more fully embrace Creative Commons licensing as all of my public photos have an “attribution-NonCommercial” license. I love being part of a community that communicates through images.

December 18, 2004 , ,

Flickr

I like to think that I’m an alpha geek. I try as much stuff out as I can and I like to be able to see things that are coming or things that I want to see develop. There were some rumblings about Flickr and I noticed it and looked at the site and the photos there a few times and read about it, but never signed up. Finally I did and I was hooked fairly quickly. Flickr is a way to share photos which isn’t really that revolutionary, but it’s how they do it that is remarkable. There are a bunch of ways to put galleries together to share images, but they can be a bit of a pain. If you want to have more personal photos you can set up rules and passwords, but that’s not a lot of fun. Flickr really clicked for me when I realized that I was emailing the same photos to different people. It would make more sense to have the photos in one place and let them go there. Then it clicked even more when I made the connection between RSS and Flickr. In the same way that I don’t need to go to a different site to see if it has been updated, it’s easier to check the feed. With Flickr you have an imagestream, which consists of the photos that you upload. You can also view streams by how they are tagged or who uploads them. When this is combined with the ability to share certain images with contacts or friends or family or everyone it moves into the killer app territory. It’s in beta now and all of the details aren’t worked out, but I’m hooked. It’s easier to understand once you use it though. The interesting thing is not that you have a limited amount of space, but it is how the space is limited. You have limits on how much you upload each month. So the bias of the system is to post stuff every month (or day or hour if you start to use it a lot). If you have a cell phone with a camera you can send images directly to Flickr. If you have a blog you can blog directly from Flickr. Technologically it’s great, but the social component is what will make it stick… that and the well-documented Flickr API that lets you make other cool new things out of it and of course they have a blog. They also have Creative Commons licensing built-in as well! Hopefully as it develops and the pricing scheme is worked out it will take off. This is going to be very big I think. In some ways I think that Flickr and the RSS and Atom feeds that it generates will also help a lot of people understand why they would want to use feeds. Outside of the more tech-savvy blogging world there are a lot of people who use the Web and don’t use feeds. NetNewsWire has changed the way that I view the Web because of how it lets me use the feeds and I think that Flickr is dramatically changing the way that I see sharing images. You can go to my Flickr page and you’ll only see the photos that you’re allowed to see… if you’re a contact you’ll see more, if you’re not you’ll only see the public photos. It’s simple, functional and addictive!

September 6, 2004 , , , , , , ,

Creative Commons New Licenses

I’m a big fan of the Creative Commons project. They keep expanding the project with new licenses more specifically targeted to music and countries other than the USA. You can search for content and create your own derivative works. Many people are embracing the model of sharing and respecting the audience. Right now I’m listening to a stream from Magnatune who have built their online record label around Creative Commons licenses. The reason that I’m writing now is that they’ve revamped their licenses and I’ve revised my licensing. Now the written content on the site is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 deed. There also is a new logo that you’ll see at the bottom of the site. That means that you can use anything that I’ve written on the site as long as you give me credit and you aren’t using it commercially and you can also modify what I’ve written as long as you allow others the same right. Everyone should contribute to the commons!

June 7, 2004 , , ,

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