The Stanford Open Source Lab is a nexus for people in the Stanford University community engaged with open source software, open access, and other forms of openness as users, developers, creators, and more. They’ve had an excellent workshop series, including a talk by ccLearn’s Ahrash Bissell, available online for your viewing pleasure.

This Friday the lab is hosting its first conference — free and open to the public. They’ve put together a list of speakers (including me), and there’s also a self-organizing unconference component.

If you’re in the area check it out.  

The Free Software Foundation has just released version 1.3 of its Free Documentation License containing language which allows FDL-licensed wikis to republish FDL content under the CC Attribution-ShareAlike license until August 1, 2009. Excepted from this are FDL documents originating elsewhere unless they have been incorporated into the wiki prior to November 1, 2008.

This is a crucial step toward de-fracturing the free (culture) as in (software) freedom world, which should have the impact of greatly accelerating the growth of that world. Last December the Wikimedia Foundation requested that the FSF make this step.

Thanks and congratulations to the WMF and FSF (if you haven’t wished the latter a hearty 25th anniversary yet, please do so) and to the free world.

The next step is for the Wikipedia/Wikimedia community (and other FDL-licensed wikis) to decide to offer wiki content under CC BY-SA 3.0.

We hope that these communities find CC the best steward for free culture licenses to be relied upon for massively collaborative works. See our Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses and Approved for Free Cultural Works branding rolled out in February and April of this year respectively for some background on this.

In the longer term (i.e., in a future version of the CC BY-SA license, which as the FSF does their licenses, we version very carefully and deliberately) we will address other issues of particular interest to communities creating massively collaborative works, in particular attribution for such situations (our version 2.5 licenses begin to do this) and how strongly copyleft (ShareAlike in CC parlance) attaches to the context in which CC BY-SA licensed images are used (as we did for video synced to music in version 2.0).

Thanks again to the FSF and WMF, which as CC does, build critical infrastructure for a free world. All of these organizations are nonprofits deserving of your support. CC is running its annual fundraising campaign right now. :)

Also see Lawrence Lessig’s post on Enormously important news from the Free Software Foundation.

Monday the 3rd COMMUNIA Workshop on Marking the Public Domain: Relinquishment and Certification included a panel on marking and tagging public domain works, featuring presentations by Safe Creative’s Mario Pena (Safe Creative’s apprach to registering public domain works), Patrick Peiffer of the Bibliothèque nationale de Luxembourg (and CC Luxembourg), Jonathan Gray (OKF), and me (certifying public domain works).

In the future we will work with Safe Creative and others on registry standards to ensure openness and interoperability — see both Mario and my slides for some of this.

Soon all presentations from the workshop will be available for download.

Remember that Safe Creative is generously matching contributions to the CC fall fundraising campaign. Thanks again to Safe Creative!

Yesterday RDFa, a technical standard Creative Commons has championed at the World Wide Web Consortium for five years, was made a W3C Recommendation — a standard for the web to build upon.

CC founding board member and MIT computer science professor Hal Abelson sends this message:

Dear Staff and Board,

I’m writing with some great news:

Today, the technical specification RDFa in XHTML Syntax and Processing was formally accepted as a Web Consortium Technical Recommendation by W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee.

Those the words might not mean much to any but the geekiest of us — but this is a big deal.

Creative Commons was a early adopter of Semantic Web standards. And yet, while the Semantic Web provided RDF as a standard for expressing metadata, it did not provide a standard for how that metadata should be integrated into ordinary Web pages.

The original concept of the Semantic Web did not encompass the notion that ordinary Web pages would be augmented with machine-readable metadata. Even today, that notion remains controversial. One considerable faction still holds that HTML should be purely a formatting language with no provision for any semantic information at all. Other factions, like microformats community, advocate metadata standards that do not integrate well into RDF and general Semantic Web applications.

CC licensing was the first use of the Web to envision Web publishers augmenting their pages with small amounts of machine-readable markup: the CC licensing attributes. It was our desire achieve this consistently with the Semantic Web that led to our involvement with the Web standards community; and the need to advocate for such a standard was why CC joined the Web Consortium in the first place.

RDFa is the standard that has emerged from this effort. RDFa is a general mechanism for expressing machine-readable attributes on Web pages in a way that is integrates with HTML. The most obvious example for us is the Creative Commons Rights Expression language (ccREL) — a machine-readable way to express CC licensing.

W3C’s adoption today of the RDFa recommendation solidifies the technical underpinning of ccREL and opens the door to the development and widespread support for CC-compliant tools on the Web.

There are many people who deserve credit for RDFa. Mike Linksvayer and Nathan Yergler certainly get kudos for their consistent support and development of the CC infrastructure to emphasize RDFa and ccREL.

But the lion’s share of the credit goes to Ben Adida, CC’s W3C representative, who led this effort creatively and tirelessly. Ben’s leadership in the technical design of RDFa and the negotiations and refinements to bring RDFa all the way through the complex Web standards process has been an effort of more than five years.

This work on RDFa not only has major benefit to CC, but it’s a significant example CC providing technical leadership in Web community and a contribution that will have implications far beyond CC’s own applications.

Ben deserves our sincerest thanks and congratulations.

== Hal

(Also check out Hal’s starring role in the new Jesse Dylan video about Creative Commons, A Shared Culture.)

Congratulations and thanks to Ben and everyone else who has worked so hard on this effort for so many years.

If you’re a web developer, check out RDFa and ccREL. A great place to start is Ben’s Introduction to ccREL talk from our first CC technology summit held in June (slides and video available at the link; also check out the CFP for our upcoming December tech summit at MIT). Ben also recommends a new post from the founder of Drupal on Drupal, the semantic web and search.

Otherwise (and even if you are a web developer), the best way to support this work is by supporting Creative Commons. Our annual fundraising campaign just kicked off yesterday, so now is an excellent time to give.

Thanks!

Giorgos Cheliotis has written a report on Free Culture 2008, last mentioned here when the program was announced. Here’s an excerpt describing the final session, A Research and Action Agenda for Free Culture:

This was the most important session for the future of research on free culture. The aim of the session was to (a) identify future directions that would be ripe with research challenges but also promising to yield insight that would be useful to the practice of free culture advocacy, and (b) make an assessment of the workshop and decide whether to repeat it and in what format.

The session started with a discussion of potential areas of research, where the collection of more data and the visualization of this data for intuitive exploration and communication of findings was proposed as one potential area of focus. Action research was also mentioned as a methodology that would be relevant in the context of practice-inspired and practice-informed research. Global-scope studies and comparative studies across multiple jurisdictions were also favored by some participants as areas needing much more development. But the discussion quickly turned to practical issues, such as how to organize a network for continuous communication and collaboration among interested researchers and whether we should plan a journal special issue, or a special track in an existing research conference.

Participants tried to propose solutions to the perennial problem of engaging in interdisciplinary collaborations while at the same time being respected in one’s own scientific community. There was some consensus that we should not attempt to create a new discipline, but that we nevertheless need venues and opportunities to engage in cross-disciplinary dialogue and do research across disciplinary boundaries, as the phenomena that interest us the most tend to cut across multiple dimensions of the Internet, including law, IT, economics, communications, media studies and policy (just to name a few).

The most concrete and positive outcome of the entire workshop was the unanimous agreement of all participants to the idea of repeating this gathering on an annual basis. Epitomizing the positive assessment of this year’s proceedings was Lawrence Lessig’s proposal to help find a venue for the workshop next year and also to help turn it into a larger and more substantive academic conference, a proposal that was greeted with enthusiasm by the rest of the participants in the session.

The rest of the discussion focused on what the envisioned conference should look like, in light of the lessons we learned from Free Culture 2008. It was tentatively agreed to raise the bar for participation at the conference next year by requiring that presenters submit a full paper at some stage in the process (this year it was optional and selection was based solely on extended abstracts). This, along with having more time dedicated to research presentations and research-focused discussion will help ensure that next year’s event will be more focused and session participation will be more consistent, which will be essential to building rapport and promoting genuine dialogue among participants.

Some participants also voiced concerns with respect to the conference potentially attaining too much of a traditional academic character and losing the relative spontaneity and participatory nature of the iSummit. It was therefore suggested that we maintain some slots for open discussion and seek to synthesize perspectives and findings in the form of panels or by any other means, instead of focusing only on single-person presentations. Finally, several potential publishing venues were brought up but it was agreed that it is somewhat premature to be concerned with this at the moment and we should rather focus our energies in planning Free Culture 2009.

Read the whole report and look forward to Free Culture 2009!

Lucas Gonze, engaged in a blogversation about what music labels really are and what they can be in the future, doesn’t know, but has a suggestion for how a label might figure it out (emphasis added):

Mo bettah, Mr. Hands

Clustering is something labels are already doing. Blue Note is for jazz. Warp is for a particular kind of electronica. Matador, Sub Pop, Metal Blade…

Which brings me back to Ian’s proposal to Guy Hands: reconfigure your labels to be based around affinities and focused narrowly enough to serve roughly the same audiences from release to release. I’ll buy that this is an important thing to do, and the need is not going away. But I’m still skeptical that record companies can cannibalize their current business to do the right thing in this new niche, and in the meantime YouTube, Myspace, CC Mixter, and GYBO are doing fine without them.

So here’s my proposal to Guy Hands as to what he should do with EMI’s new music business.

Creative Commons has posted a Request for Proposals (RFP) regarding the future of the ccMixter.org site, and Victor has posted detailed comments on this. If I were EMI I would step in to operate CC Mixter. It’s a fully functional cluster of music makers with a strong hold on its niche. I don’t know how to monetize it at the scale EMI would need, but I do know that at least EMI would be in the game. Take over and learn how it works. Use the time to gain the institutional skills in managing community. This will take a while, but in a few years the Mixter community will have started to reverse colonize your company. And that’s EMI needs — to absorb the values and skills needed to manage clusters.

Also check out Lucas’ music blog, a very cool mix of the old and new — fresh guitar recordings of sheet music in the public domain (recordings under CC BY-SA) and an experiment in digital music packaging and of control of a musician’s identity on the web.

I’m fond of pointing out that discovery is perhaps the biggest challenge and opportunity faced by the cultural commons — however you want to define “commons” — public domain, Free, everything CC licensed, all of “Web 2.0″, or something else.

However you define it, the commons includes at least many thousands to many millions of cultural works in every obvious medium — too much for any individual to make sense of. So it’s always exciting to see major hubs develop and refine methods for curating and exposing the best of the commons.

In this vein Wikimedia Commons just rolled out a procedure for highlighting Most Valued Images. Wikimedia Commons already does a great job of highlighting quality images (see our post on their pictures of the year), but the usefulness of an image in the context of a digital encyclopedia is different than an image’s overall quality:

The quality images project aims to identify and encourage users who provide images of high technical quality to Commons. Featured pictures are the cream of the crop at Commons and is reserved for images of both extraordinary value and technical quality.

Valued images, on the other hand, are those that are the most valuable of their kind for use in an online context, within other Wikimedia projects. The technical requirements for valued images are typically much lower, as there is no concern about suitability for print usage. A built-in camera in a modern mobile phone should be sufficient if the subject is of high value and the photo illustrates it well at a viewing size of 480×360 pixels or equivalent. Valued images are less about technical quality and more about your ingenuity in finding good and valuable subjects which matter, and about the usability of the information on the image page.

It’s easy to see the usefulness of similar breakdowns in other projects. For example, on a music remix site such as ccMixter, the best fully mixed tracks are most enjoyable to listen to, but the best a cappellas and samples are probably the most valuable content in the sense that the former build upon and require the latter.

So this is a challenge to think about and implement improved curation and discovery in multiple dimensions throughout the commons.

Seven months ago we noted that LibriVox released their 1,000th public domain audio book. Now they’ve reached 1,500. That’s over 70 audio books released each month, and things are picking up — they released 115 in May.

Check out LibriVox, perhaps the most interesting collaborative culture project this side of Wikipedia — and everything on LibriVox is in the public domain, free for any use, without restriction.

LibriVox founder Hugh McGuire recently posted an explanation of why LibriVox audio books are dedicated to the public domain rather than released under a CC license:

So LibriVox is a small beacon of light in this policy question, slowly adding to the public domain while all around the public domain is shrinking. this is important in some broad sense beyond anything particular we do at librivox. at least I think it is.

The whole essay is well worth reading.

Late last year we started a process for moving ccMixter.org, the remix community we launched November 2004, to an entity or person(s) that could take the community to the next (several) levels.

eMXR describes ccMixter:

trend setting web destination … which has become the premier on-line artist’s village for music makers from around the world, who sample, cut-up, share and remix each other’s music legally, creatively and joyfully.

This description is corroborated by the quality of artists drawn to collaborate with the ccMixter community and the receptivity of that community, which has remixed nearly 80% of uploaded a cappellas. The software that runs the site is also award winning.

If you aren’t familiar with ccMixter, or hadn’t realized how cool it is, go visit the site, then return here.

The process of finding a new home for ccMixter included a survey of the ccMixter community. Results of the survey are presented at the end of this post.

Today we’re announcing a Request For Proposals from entities interested in taking over the site. Please read the entire RFP. Proposals are due within 60 days (July 29) to ccmixter-rfp@creativecommons.org. Inquiries before submitting a proposal are most welcome, to the same address. Please use this address for all inquiries rather than contacting CC or ccMixter personnel directly.

The Creative Commons board will make the final determination, but here are some guidelines for what we’re looking for in an acquirer (from the RFP):

1. Commitment and ability to conform to principles described in guidelines [at http://lessig.org/blog/2007/11/ccmixter_thinking_about_where.html].
2. Plan and vision for ccMixter after completion of the transaction:
   1. Concreteness of plan;
   2. Viability of Participant and Participant’s proposal for ccMixter– long and short term; and
   3. Scale and impact of success (taking into account web site growth plans and other marketing and promotional plans).
3. Amount and terms of financial compensation to CC.
4. Capability to run and further develop a best of breed major music website, including resources and demonstrated expertise in the following:
   1. Web technology;
   2. Music industry;
   3. Legal;
   4. Community management; and
   5. Finance.
5. Understanding of and sensitivity to the needs of open sharing communities.
6. Understanding of and compatibility with Creative Commons’ mission.

We’re eager to see what the ccMixter can become — and confident it will be amazing. If the above sounds like your company or organization, please read the RFP and respond.

ccMixter community survey results summary

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Denver Gingerich writes about a 1979 feature article about copyright that appeared in the University of Waterloo’s Gazette:

I found it especially neat that the Gazette includes this note: “Editorial material may be reprinted freely; credit would be appreciated.” This seems similar in intent to the Creative Commons Attribution license (possibly with a No Derivative Works clause). From what I’ve seen of recent newspapers, a license that allows free
redistribution is seldom used anymore. I wonder why that is.

Denver put the whole feature on his website.

Previously: Creative Commons 868 and 1967.