Digital Tipping Point, a documentary on the free software and free culture movements, recently posted over 80 digitized hours (350 hours have been shot in total) of CC BY-SA licensed footage of “leading politicians, CEOs, and software developers from all over the world.” The footage is available for free at their archive.org page:

The DTP crew describes their project as a Point-of-View (POV) documentary film about the rapidly growing global shift to open source software, and the effects that massive wave of technological change will have on literacy, art, and culture around the world.

The DTP crew says their project will be the first feature length documentary about free open source software to be built in an open source fashion out of video submitted to the Internet Archive.

[...]

The DTP crew invites you to take their video and rip, mix and burn it however you like, for whatever purpose you like. You can even use the footage for your own commercial film, as long as you release your final product under a Creative Commons Attribute-ShareAlike license.

Victor Stone, programmer and site admin at ccMixter, has a great post about the project up on his blog. We previously discussed Digital Tipping Point back in 2006.

Last night I had the pleasure of attending Art Knows No Borders, an event that was both a fundraiser for Doctors Without Borders and a release party for Bombardirovka, a book written by Crystal Allen Cook in 2004 while she was in Armenia on a Fulbright Scholarship. The novel is a work of fiction that, in the words of Cook, functions “to observe, up close, how the past, not necessarily even our own personal past, lives on the actions and bodies of people living in the present.”

Bombardirovka is free to download and released under a CC BY-NC-SA license, meaning it can be re-used and adapted in any way as long as it is non-commercial in intent, shared under the same license as the original, and Crystal Cook is properly attributed. Check out the Share Novel page on Bombardirovka’s website in the coming weeks to find more about interesting reuse opportunities ahead.

Mark Hosler, co-founder of experimental music and sound collage act Negativland, recently took a trip to Washington D.C., where he penned this letter to members of congress on creativity and copyright. From metroactive:

Ours is a world in which copyright has fallen woefully behind the curve of what the public actually wants to do with all that digital “stuff” out there. Millions worldwide are creating art, music and video that incorporate elements of existing work—cutting and pasting bits and pieces of music, video, text, and pictures made by others to create new works. Millions of web pages now use various Creative Commons licenses to provide a nuanced alternative to traditionally black and white interpretations of copyright laws (one such license Negativland helped to write). The prevalence of these alternative copyright strategies is a testament to how many of your constituents are not at all happy with copyright as it stands now.

Negativland have been working through these sort of issues for close to three decades and even helped us in the drafting of our (now retired) CC Sampling license. Hosler’s piece is a great read and makes a compelling argument that recent changes in the ways that art and culture are created and distributed make a fresh approach to copyright a necessity. While this may not be anything new Mike Doyle, we hope that it inspires conversation among other policy makers.

Spot.us is a recentlly launched nonprofit project from the Center for Media Change that aims to pioneer “community funded reporting.” Stories are pitched online with an amount of money needed for publication - users and site visitors can donate to any pitch they deem worthy, with the resulting article released under a CC BY license. From Poytner Online:

Users create story ideas that they think should be investigated and submit them to the site. From these ideas, journalists choose to write story pitches and open the idea up to the public to make donations. Once the project reaches its funding goal, those who have donated pay up and the journalist produces the story. If the project doesn’t receive enough funding, no one is charged. After the story is complete, Spot.Us publishes it and offers it to news organizations for free (the site’s content is licensed under Creative Commons). There is an option for news organizations to buy exclusive rights to the story, with the funding money going back to the journalist.

Spot.us has been getting a ton of great press including a nice write-up in the New York Times. Check out the site - no articles have been published yet but there are plenty of great pitches waiting to be funded. Similarly, don’t hesitate to start your own.

Open Music Wire is a new initiative from Musik1 that promotes CC-licensed music from affiliated net-labels. Most readily seen as a music blog, OMW curates the music they feature on their home page in an effort to shine a light on the songs and artists they find particularly inspiring. All of the music on the site is released under a CC BY-NC-ND license.

OMW is still in beta, so many of the services aren’t fully launched. With that said, it is important to note that although there is a distinct emphasis on OMW’s affiliated net-labels, anyone can submit music to their Open Music Library as long as it is licensed correctly. Presumably, this music will not only be freely available but also pooled for the curated content on the main page.

Kaltura, an “open-source platform for video creation, management, interaction, and collaboration”, boasts a robust platform uncommon among web-apps that includes the ability to annotate, remix, edit, and share video collaboratively over the web. 

Of particular interest to the CC-community is Kaltura’s decision to require that all user-submitted media be licensed under a CC BY-SA license, creating a community of true sharing and remixing that is in line with our Free Cultural Works guidelines. From Kaltura:

Kaltura’s open source platform enables any site to seamlessly and cost–effectively integrate advanced interactive rich–media functionalities, including video searching, uploading, importing, editing, annotating, remixing, and sharing. Kaltura’s goal is to bring interactive video to every site and to create the world’s largest distributed video network.

Kaltura are also funding open video work at Wikimedia, great news we posted earlier here.

The Outcomes Star System is a “tool for measuring the outcomes of work with homeless people,” specifically designed for use by homeless charities. The Outcomes Star System focuses on “an approach to measuring change” on 10 different criteria, the theory being that by following The Outcomes Star System, outreach to the homeless can be approached with pragmatism and a level of success.

Homeless Outcomes, the group behind the Star System, has published their entire website under a CC BY-NC-SA license, including the Star System. By allowing these files to be easily shared and reused legally, Homeless Outcomes is empowering other groups by offering them a free and open system to help enact social change. You can see the Outcomes Star re-posted below:

Games for the Brain is a fun site that features a number of memory, quiz, and brain games all released under a CC BY-NC-SA license. A number of the games are embeddable, making them easily available for sharing while others reuse previously CC-licensed material. Whether it is an online destination to pass time, procrastinate, or hone your mental skills, Games for the Brain is a nice and simple addition to the growing landscape of CC-licensed content.

Games for the Brain is a fun site that features a number of memory, quiz, and brain games all released under a CC BY-NC-SA license. A number of the games are embeddable, making them easily available for sharing while others reuse previously CC-licensed material. Whether it is an online destination to pass time, procrastinate, or hone your mental skills, Games for the Brain is a nice and simple addition to the growing landscape of CC-licensed content.

A reminder that TONIGHT CC Salon LA returns with a fantastic combination of presenters - joining us will be web radio collective Dublab and Lucas Gonze, net-label theorist and XSPF developer.

Both presentations will discuss how CC, and ‘openness’ in general, is affecting web radio and net labels, both from an economic and artistic vantage, with a Q&A to follow each. Additionally, Dublab will ask salon attendees to create noise - both as a group and as individuals - which will be recorded and turned into audio loops that will be used for the Into Infinity project, a new art exhibition produced in collaboration with Creative Commons.

The Salon will be taking place at the always wonderful FOUND Gallery (Google map) between 7:30PM - 9:30PM. Follow the event on Upcoming, mark attending on Facebook, and make sure to come down and hear from two exemplary members of the CC community on their experiences with open licensing. As always, there will be free (as in beer) drinks for the entire night.