Freedom for IP » creative commons http://freedomforip.org Dreaming of Intellectual Prosperity Mon, 07 May 2012 22:39:40 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 Legal Intern @ CC for the Summer http://freedomforip.org/2008/06/06/legal-intern-cc-for-the-summer/ http://freedomforip.org/2008/06/06/legal-intern-cc-for-the-summer/#comments Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:35:58 +0000 Brian Rowe http://freedomforip.org/?p=313 Brian RoweStarting June 9th I will be working at Creative Commons as their summer legal intern. This is an amazing opportunity for me. I will be working under the new General Council Diane Peters. I will be blogging about the experience here and at the Seattle University Law PILF summer journal. I am excited about getting more hands on experience with the CC licenses and meeting more of the Copyright 2.0 community and the Free Culture community. This will be a busy and exciting summer.

Upcoming Commitments:
June 6-7th Washington State Bar Access To Justice Conference In Vancouver, WA
June 9th First day working at CC
June 14-15th Seattle Bar Camp
June 16-17th No Time to Think Conference at UW Law school and Ischool
June 18th Copyright 2.0 Tech conference at Google
July 28 – August 1st Isummit Sapporo Japan

I am sure there will be other events in SF that I will be attending. If you are aware of any I should attend feel free to email me Brian <at> FreedomforIP.org.

PS This is post number 200 for FFIP! Thanks You to everyone that helps make this site, this blog and this organization possible – especially those who blog, comment and contribute to the wiki.

]]> http://freedomforip.org/2008/06/06/legal-intern-cc-for-the-summer/feed/ 0 Major Leadership and Staff Changes at CC http://freedomforip.org/2008/04/01/major-leadership-and-staff-changes-at-cc/ http://freedomforip.org/2008/04/01/major-leadership-and-staff-changes-at-cc/#comments Tue, 01 Apr 2008 23:42:00 +0000 Brian Rowe http://freedomforip.org/2008/04/01/major-leadership-and-staff-changes-at-cc/ CC has announced some major shifts in leadership today:

Lawrence Lessig is stepping down as CEO of Creative Commons. He will be replaced by entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and free culture advocate Joi Ito. Lessig will remain on the Creative Commons board.

James Boyle will become chair of the board, replacing Ito, who remains on the board.

Diane Peters joins CC as General Counsel. Peters arrives from the Mozilla Corporation, serves on the board of the Software Freedom Law Center, and was previously General Counsel for Open Source Development Labs and the Linux Foundation. She has extensive experience collaborating with and advising nonprofit organizations, development communities, and high-tech companies on a variety of matters.

Vice President and General Counsel Virginia Rutledge will take on a new role as Vice President and Special Counsel. In her new role, Rutledge will focus on development and external relations, while continuing to lead special legal projects.

These are good moves for CC’s long term sustainability. Lessig has moved his scholarship and political focus away from copyright reform and to political reform. The Change Congress campaign is the right place from him to focus. Joi Ito is well known board member of CC will easily be able to transition to ED while providing leadership from a business prospective. Diane Peters also appears to be a large gain for CC. Her commitment to open software and NPO’s should be a valuable addition to CC.

Official Press Release

]]> http://freedomforip.org/2008/04/01/major-leadership-and-staff-changes-at-cc/feed/ 0 NTC 2008: Fair Use & CC Slides http://freedomforip.org/2008/03/16/ntc-2008-fair-use-cc-slides/ http://freedomforip.org/2008/03/16/ntc-2008-fair-use-cc-slides/#comments Sun, 16 Mar 2008 23:06:28 +0000 Brian Rowe http://freedomforip.org/2008/03/16/ntc-2008-fair-use-cc-slides/

Check the slides out. These are the slides for my panel on copyright at the 2008 Nonprofit Technology Conference. The panel is Friday at 3:30 pm, but I am willing to talk about Fair Use, CC or Copyright at anytime during the conference.

]]> http://freedomforip.org/2008/03/16/ntc-2008-fair-use-cc-slides/feed/ 0 Creative Commons Turns 5 http://freedomforip.org/2007/12/16/creative-commons-turns-5/ http://freedomforip.org/2007/12/16/creative-commons-turns-5/#comments Sun, 16 Dec 2007 19:36:00 +0000 Riana Pfefferkorn http://freedomforip.org/blog/?p=149 Last night Creative Commons celebrated its fifth birthday with an excellent party in San Francisco and several announcements. Due to the difficult acoustics situation in the venue, I was unable to hear just what Prof. Lessig was saying most of the time, and there don’t seem to be announcements on his blog or the CC website yet, so I hope I get this right – please check those sites soon for more authoritative information. (Meanwhile, here is another partygoer’s post, far more detailed than mine.)
- CC met and exceeded its goal of raising half a million dollars in individual donations by Dec. 31. It’s also just raised a massive amount of funding from other sources, as covered in the above-linked SocialMedia post. Congrats!
- CC is starting a Legal Commons (Beta), to debut on Jan. 15, with some sort of affiliation with Carl Malamud of public.resource.org. The gist of the announcement seemed to be that all federal cases will be publicly accessible (dating back to when, I’m not sure). This is excellent news for those of us in the legal community, and, as a friend of mine commented, “It raises a big middle finger pointed directly at Eagan, Minnesota” (home of Thomson West, i.e. Westlaw). As the open access journal movement continues to gain steam, law journals that want to go open access – and their readers – will benefit from open resources such as public.resource.org, Altlaw, and the forthcoming Legal Commons, as they provide alternative/parallel citations to Westlaw and Lexis/Nexis. Much of the value of a law journal article is in the citations, so readers can now follow up on a citation even if they don’t have (cheap/free) access to Westlaw or Lexis.
- There are going to be new CC licensing options: CC+, which adds more rights than any CC license currently offers; and CC-0 [zero], which allows a creator to waive all rights over her work and to authenticate that waiver with a signature, in a machine-readable way. I’m not sure what the details of the CC+ license are and I hope I’m getting CC-0 right. I was not able to ask Prof. Lessig what is probably a question that has already been answered, or for which he would have a ready, detailed answer (as he usually does when asked pretty much anything, from “Hey, should privacy rights be alienable?” to questions about unladen swallows’ airspeed). My question is, What about the analog hole? This has surely come up in the context of existing CC licenses. If CC-licensed (or CC-0 rights-waived) content jumps offline, doesn’t the machine-readable license tethered to that content by a bunch of ones and zeroes become useless? Does it become, to borrow a loaded word, orphaned? I should investigate this on my own, but I address it to the Lazyweb here in the hopes that people whose minds don’t get easily distracted by DJ Spooky and chocolate cake (man that was a great party) will weigh in.
Happy birthday, CC!
UPDATE: Aha, Lessig has blogged about the party, the money, and the new licenses. Among the various clarifications of my mealy-mouthed interpretation of his announcements Saturday, Lessig says all federal case law will be free by about this time next year. Tasty.
]]> http://freedomforip.org/2007/12/16/creative-commons-turns-5/feed/ 0 Magnatune: An Ethical Alternative to iTunes http://freedomforip.org/2007/10/30/magnatune-an-ethical-alternative-to-itunes/ http://freedomforip.org/2007/10/30/magnatune-an-ethical-alternative-to-itunes/#comments Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:42:00 +0000 Brian Rowe http://freedomforip.org/blog/?p=118 Magnatune is a Creative Commons licensed music site that allows you to listen to all their music streaming online for free. If you like the music you can purchase music CD’s or download MP3′s for for a price of your choosing. Many advocates of strong All Rights Reserved(ARR) copyright claim that ARR copyright is need to help new artist make a name for themselves. Distribution models like Amie Street and Magnatune are challenging this assumption head on.

They have a portion of the site dedicated to Why They are Not Evil.

Top 5 reasons they are not evil:

  • Musicians get paid: 50% of your purchase price goes directly to the musician, not to labels and their lawyer.
  • Give to your friends: We encourage you to give 3 copies of any music you buy to your friends
  • Remix friendly: Tons of our music, acapellas and samples are available for Remixing at CC Mixter All our 128k MP3s are some-rights-reserved Creative Commons licensed
  • No major labels: we have absolutely nothing to do with major labels or the RIAA

  • No DRM: No copy protection (DRM), you can do what you like with your music, unlike iTunes and Windows-media based web sites.

    • Freedom for IP greatly respects the work done by Magnatune and encourages the development of new business models in the music industry to appropriately reflect our technologically advanced culture.

    ]]>     http://freedomforip.org/2007/10/30/magnatune-an-ethical-alternative-to-itunes/feed/ 0     NTEN call for an IP panel on copyright options http://freedomforip.org/2007/10/24/nten-call-for-an-ip-panel-on-copyright-options/ http://freedomforip.org/2007/10/24/nten-call-for-an-ip-panel-on-copyright-options/#comments Wed, 24 Oct 2007 21:41:00 +0000 Brian Rowe http://freedomforip.org/blog/?p=113
    I just finished doing NTEN’s online survey for 2008 NTC Agenda. I was surprised to not see a single topic or part of a topic that dealt with online copyright issues. When distributing information online ones IP strategy should play a central role in letting users know what they can do with your content and what happens to their contribution. SecondLife, Myspace, Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube all have different ways of controlling and enabling distribution through IP choices.

    I would love to run a session on using Creative Commons and alternative licensing of intellectual property to reach more constituents and more people in need. Using a culture of sharing as a form of distribution can empower your IP to work for you. If you are attending NTC this year and would find a copyright session useful please let NTEN know.

    ]]>     http://freedomforip.org/2007/10/24/nten-call-for-an-ip-panel-on-copyright-options/feed/ 0     Ourspace update: New date for Thirdplace Books, October 18th http://freedomforip.org/2007/10/02/ourspace-update-new-date-for-thirdplace-books-october-18th/ http://freedomforip.org/2007/10/02/ourspace-update-new-date-for-thirdplace-books-october-18th/#comments Tue, 02 Oct 2007 18:14:00 +0000 Brian Rowe http://freedomforip.org/blog/?p=89 The talk and book signing at Third Place Books has been moved from October 27th to October 18th. The Elliot Bay event is still this Wednesday at 7:30pm, hope to see people there.

    Book Event:

    Thursday, October 18, 2007, 6:30 pm
    Talk & Book Signing
    Third Place Books
    Ravenna Third Place
    6504 20th Ave NE
    Seattle, WA 98115
    206-366-3316

    PS: The book is under an all rights reserved copyright… although one chapter is available online at the wiki. http://www.upress.umn.edu/wiki/index.php/OurSpace One chapter is a small step in the right direction.

    ]]>     http://freedomforip.org/2007/10/02/ourspace-update-new-date-for-thirdplace-books-october-18th/feed/ 0     OurSpace, author Christine Harold, Speaking in Seattle x2 http://freedomforip.org/2007/09/30/ourspace-author-christine-harold-speaking-in-seattle-x2/ http://freedomforip.org/2007/09/30/ourspace-author-christine-harold-speaking-in-seattle-x2/#comments Mon, 01 Oct 2007 04:50:00 +0000 Brian Rowe http://freedomforip.org/blog/?p=88 Come out to Elliott Bay Book Company Wednesday or Saturday the 27th to meet Christine Harold. We need you to help resist the corporate control of culture.

    In OurSpace, Christine Harold examines the deployment and limitations of “culture jamming” by activists. For Harold, it is a different type of opposition that offers a genuine alternative to corporate consumerism. Exploring the revolutionary Creative Commons movement, copyleft, and open source technology, Harold advocates a more inclusive approach to intellectual property that invites innovation and wider participation in the creative process.

    Christine Harold is a professor in the Department of Communications at the University of Washington. Her previous position was assistant professor of speech communication at the University of Georgia.

    Book events for OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture by Christine Harold

    Book Event
    Wednesday, October 3, 2007, 7:30 pm
    Talk & Book Signing
    Elliott Bay Book Company
    101 South Main Street
    Seattle, Washington 98104
    206-624-6600

    Book Event
    Saturday, October 27, 2007, 6:30 pm
    Talk & Book Signing
    Third Place Books
    17171 Bothell Way NE
    Lake Forest Park, WA 98155
    206-366-3316

    More information available at:

    http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/H/harold_ourspace.html

    PS The publisher has not returned my emails about the what copyright the book is under and why… If the publisher is holding it hostage under a full right reserved license we may need to take action.

    ]]>     http://freedomforip.org/2007/09/30/ourspace-author-christine-harold-speaking-in-seattle-x2/feed/ 0     ATJWeb.org is now using a CC license http://freedomforip.org/2007/07/19/atjweborg-is-now-using-a-cc-license/ http://freedomforip.org/2007/07/19/atjweborg-is-now-using-a-cc-license/#comments Fri, 20 Jul 2007 01:15:00 +0000 Brian Rowe http://freedomforip.org/blog/?p=75 This is a great example of how a Creative Commons License can work to enable the mission and goals of an organization.

    If you are not familiar with ATJWeb you should check it out. It is based on the Washington State Supreme Court’s order designed to increase access to the justice system by applying principles that focus technology implementors and the justice system in general on values including privacy and accessibility.

    www.ATJWeb.org

    Access to Justice (ATJ) Web seeks to help guide the development of technology to help those in need. Through the ATJ Technology Principles we can use technology to give everyone fair access to the justice system a reality in Washington State and beyond.

    ]]>     http://freedomforip.org/2007/07/19/atjweborg-is-now-using-a-cc-license/feed/ 0     Why copyright NPO web sites? http://freedomforip.org/2007/02/17/why-copyright-npo-web-sites/ http://freedomforip.org/2007/02/17/why-copyright-npo-web-sites/#comments Sun, 18 Feb 2007 01:19:00 +0000 Brian Rowe http://freedomforip.org/blog/?p=42 As a non profit why lock away your contributions to society with a threat to litigate?

    All copyright does is allow you to sue someone if your work is used by someone else.

    Non-profits should tag their work with a Creative Commons license that allows other to build on the work and add to the NPO community as a whole.

    I strongly recommend removing copyright notices in favor of an attribution only license which allows other to build on your contributions to the community as long as they credit the author. Most NPO’s want their work distributed in ways that help as many people as possible. All a copyright notice does is discourage sharing with the community as a whole.

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