Less than 72 hours after the Obama-Biden Transition Team adopted our most permissive license for Change.gov, Cerado Ventana has built a Change.gov iPhone, mobile application, and widget. We will never know if this application would have been built if Change.gov hadn’t chosen such a permissive license, but it just goes to show what interesting things can happen when you let the world know your work is free to be built upon.

We originally caught this via Twitter and Christopher Carfi’s “Social Customer Manifesto” blog where he expressed thanks to Obama’s team for using CC:

Thank you again to the Obama administration for opening up Change.gov with Creative Commons to make this possible, and thanks to everyone here on the team. You have been building killer technology, and have enabled us to create this new conduit for citizens and government to connect.

This is just the beginning of innovative uses of the content from Change.gov, so keep an eye out for more interesting applications and let us know about them.

Check out the widget after the jump.

If you’re in Los Angeles over the next two weeks, GOOD is hosting a series called GOOD December from Friday, 12/5 through Friday 12/19 in their new space on Melrose Avenue. It’s open to the public from 11am-5pm every day and will offer salons, panel discussions, meals, and more. There will be occasional parties in the evening hours that require an RSVP; check out the GOOD December site for more details. There’s also a nice write-up about it at Flavorpill with some useful info.

Creative Commons is collaborating with GOOD on two of the ongoing pieces of the series. One is an installation of Into Infinity - the art and music project we’re producing with Dublab. The other is a set of podcast interviews about the culture of sharing that I conducted with Jimmy Wales, Chris Hughes, Chris Dibona, Caterina Fake, Curt Smith, Joi Ito and a variety of other luminaries who use sharing as a cornerstone to work they do across a variety of fields. Snippets of the interviews will be running throughout the series’ two weeks - grab a set of headphones and listen up!

A short follow-up to our post from yesterday about how Change.gov is now available under a Creative Commons license: Lawrence Lessig announces a set of “open government” principles intended to guide the Obama-Biden transition team’s use of the Internet. Visit open-government.us for the letter and video that outline these principles, and read Ben Smith’s post on Politico for more information about this project.

HarperStudio, an imprint of the world renown publishers Harper Collins, has an interview with Joi Ito, our CEO. In his answers, Joi tackles some of the more complex implications of Creative Commons licensing for media like books:

2) Does Creative Commons have different implications for different forms of media? Would books be affected differently than music, for example?

Joi Ito: … In the case of book publishing, we have seen a variety of different examples. The basic consideration is how much demand the book already has versus the potential demand that a free download version of the book might create. Clearly there is some cannibalization of sales if people who were going to buy the book end up reading it online. However, we have quite a bit of data which supports the fact that making the book available for free increases the likelihood that the book will get stronger coverage on blogs and word of mouth and also find its way into markets not typically marketed to by the publishers. If, for instance, one allows derivative works, a good book will often quickly get translated, whole or in part, which can drive demand in International markets.

Definitely worth a read if you’re interested in the future of publishing and CC.

Update: HarperStudio also points us towards Lawrence Lessig’s appearance on KQED.

When Jeremy Keith, a web developer living and working in England took a photo of Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral and posted it to Flickr under our Attribution license (which seems to be the flavor of the month around here), he had no idea it was eventually going to end up in the blockbuster feature film Iron Man.

After explaining the terms of the CC license to a studio representative interested in using the photo in the film, Jeremy was told that it would costs at least $1500 to be attributed in the credits. So the studio offered the next best thing in lieu of being attributed properly: cash. But Jeremy turned the money down and just signed the license release anyway.

Besides being another example of Hollywood utilizing CC licensed material, this story offers insight into why we developed the CC+ protocol. CC+ is designed to help creators negotiate rights outside the scope of the license. For a lot of cases, this turns out to be our NonCommercial provision — that is, musicians offer their music to their fans under NC and use CC+ to point commercial users to a 3rd party rights broker (like Magnatune) that handles commercial rights negotiation on behalf of the artist. But here we can see another right being negotiated, that of attribution, which shows just how flexible CC licenses are.

Remember, when you’re the creator and owner of a copyrighted work, you have ultimate say over who does what with your work; CC licenses merely help you negotiate the thicket of what that “what” is.

Thanks go to Jeremy for writing up such an important example of CC licensed works being used in the wild.

As previously announced, we’re running a questionnaire on understanding “NonCommercial” use. The questionnaire runs through December 7. It takes 15-25 minutes to complete.

Click here to start the questionnaire.

Your input is greatly appreciated. CC CEO Joi Ito explains:

“The study has direct relevance to Creative Commons’ mission of providing free, flexible copyright licenses that are easy to understand and simple to use,” said Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito. “The NC term is a popular option for creators choosing a Creative Commons license, and that tells us the term meets a need. However, as exponentially increasing numbers of works are made available under CC licenses, we want to provide additional information for creators about the contexts in which the NC term may further or impede their intentions with respect to the works they choose to share, and we want to make sure that users clearly understand those intentions. We expect the study findings will help us do a better job of explaining the licenses and to improve them, where possible. We also hope the findings, which will be made publicly available, will contribute to better understanding of some of the complexities of digital distribution of content.”

You can also help by sending your friends and colleagues to the questionnaire.

digg_url = 'http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/11115';

If you don’t have time to help CC in this way, remember that we’re in the midst of our annual fundraising campaign.

Contributing in both ways would be ideal. :-)

CC licenses are an important^* part of the digital infrastructure and debate. Your financial contributions and your feedback are both crucial to the ongoing development of this infrastructure.

Click here to start the questionnaire.

^* The ‘important’ link above points out a recent extraordinarily important and visible use of the CC BY license, which does not include the NC term. As Joi points out in the quote above, we also want to provide information about contexts in which NC is not appropriate. So please take the questionnaire if you care about public copyright licenses, even if you don’t like or don’t use ones with the NonCommercial term. Thanks!

A great article in the most recent WIRED, Clive Thompson on How T-Shirts Keep Online Content Free, discusses the growing hybrid economy developed by purveyors of free content looking for a stable source of income. Their answer? Schwag in general, t-shirts in particular:

Increasingly, creative types are harnessing what I’ve begun to call “the T-shirt economy”—paying for bits by selling atoms. Charging for content online is hard, often impossible. Even 10 cents for a download of something like Red vs. Blue might drive away the fans. So instead of fighting this dynamic, today’s smart artists are simply adapting to it.

Their algorithm is simple: First, don’t limit your audience by insisting they pay to see your work. Instead, let your content roam freely online, so it generates as large an audience as possible. Then cash in on your fans’ desire to sport merchandise that declares their allegiance to you.

While Thompson doesn’t mention CC directly (he does mention Jonathan Coulton, a CC-staff favorite and current partner in our fundraising drive), he hints at the mentality behind our CC+ initiative and generally argues that openness is an important component of functional business models going forward.

To celebrate six exceptional years for CC and the December 31st wrap-up of our 2008 fundraising campaign, CC headquarters is hosting a birthday bash in San Francisco! The San Francisco party joins the ranks of other global birthday parties in Berlin, Brisbane, Guatemala, Seoul, and New York. The San Francisco event will be held on Thursday, December 18th, 2008, from 9pm - 2am at 111 Minna Gallery (Map and Directions).

We’re thrilled to announce that Into Infinity, the remixable art and music exhibition produced by dublab and Creative Commons, will make one of its first “real world” appearances as a physical installation at the party. Digital renderings of the show’s visual works will be run through a software program that melds random pieces together to create new combinations. The resulting feed will be delivered to a projector and displayed against a wall to provide ever-changing visual stimuli to our partygoers. Additionally, there will be a live performance by several dublab producers and DJs, who will use Into Infinity’s sound loops as the basis for an improvisational electronic music show.

And, of course, there will be dancing! Music will be provided by DJs Ripley and Kid Kameleon, both regulars at Surya Dub in San Francisco.

Tickets will be sold at the door, but please RSVP to rsvp[at]creativecommons.org so we know you’re coming.
From 9-11pm: $15 for CC Network members and $20 for non-members. Hosted bar: beer, wine, and well-drinks (cash bar otherwise). Join the CC Network today to secure your discount!
After 11pm: $5 for CC Network members and $10 for non-members. Cash bar.

We hope you’ll join us for a fun and festive night of celebrating free culture and the future of Creative Commons! Everyone is welcome, but space is limited - so bring friends and arrive early!

Can’t make it to San Francisco or one of the other birthday party locales? No problem! We’re encouraging members of our community around the world to come up with fun and creative ways to celebrate CC’s six years: be part of the CC Video Project and make a 90-second video about why you love CC, screen a CC-licensed film, host a Salon, make a CC re-mix, design a birthday card or poster, or consider CC’s birthday an excellent occasion to eat cake! This is a time to celebrate participatory culture, creativity, and innovation - and whatever you decide to do, make sure to document it and share it with us and the world by uploading your pictures or video to flickr and tagging them “CC6.” Head over to the Birthday Party 2008 wiki page for details on the planned parties and find out how to add your own!

Latam Commons 2008: The Public Domain, Creative Commons, and Open Education in Latin America, held Nov 19-21 in Santiago, Chile, was a great success. The event was co-hosted and excellently managed by NGO Derechos Digitales, and representatives from all over Latin America were present and actively participated in the meeting. Project Leads of Creative Commons jurisdictions first held a one-day meeting to discuss their projects, possible strategic initiatives and collaborations across the region, and shared challenges. These conversations are just the beginning of what is planned to become a regular regional gathering to leverage the expertise and resources that are distributed throughout the region. The next day was devoted to a highly interactive “unconference” on open education which brought together leading international advocates for open education with key figures in libraries and ministries of education in Chile and beyond. The goal of the meeting was to gather information regarding top concerns and key projects involved in the growth of the open education movement, to be synthesized and then leveraged for collaborative opportunities both within and beyond the region. Look for a report on this event in the coming months. Finally, Derechos Digitales orchestrated a seminar on the public domain which included cutting-edge research reports and discussions regarding the legal and practical elements of both defining and utilizing the public domain in Latin America. The philosophical and legal issues pertinent to consideration of the public domain is clearly of broad interest in the region, and we are hopeful that these ideas will continue to serve as organizing themes for ongoing conversation and action to enhance access to knowledge and improved scholarship in the future.

Additional details will be forthcoming from ccLearn, CCi, and Derechos Digitales.

The team at the travel community Dopplr has launched an autogenerative tool that magically creates city profiles utilizing “interesting” Flickr photos licensed under our free licenses.

Dopplr has aggregated thousands of travelers data and photos to create compelling pages that have autogenerated content. These pages expose fascinating trends of travelers visiting different cities. Take a look at Black Rock City’s profile:

The spike is from the famous Burning Man festival that happens at the end of the summer, and the photo is from brainsik’s flickr.

By utilizing our Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike licenses, Dopplr has effectively avoided the transaction costs typically associated with negotiating rights to use a photo in a derivative work.