PicScout Looking for Creative Professionals to Beta Test ImageExchange

fbenenson, October 27th, 2009

Are you a creative professional who frequently finds yourself using Google Image search or the Flickr commons portal to discover new images? PicScout, a company specializing in image recognition software, is working on a Firefox extension called ImageExchange that they want your help to beta test. Right now the program is in closed beta, but they’ve already implemented support for recognizing images licensed with our Attibution Non-Commercial license.

What does this mean in practice? If you come across a CC BY-NC licensed photo anywhere on the web, PicScout’s ImageExchange extension will recognize it and give you what it believes is the source URL on Flickr. Here’s a screenshot to give you the idea of the results from a search for “flowers” on Google Images:

The important part to understand is that PicScout’s extension can recognize photos anywhere on the web — from Google Image Search results to a blog you stumble across. When you click the round information button at the top right of the thumbnails that it recognizes, you’ll get a dialog box with more information. If PicScout believes the photo is CC BY-NC licensed and from Flickr, it will point you to the photo’s original page on Flickr. PicScout also recognizes rights-managed and micro-stock images from various industry databases as well. This allows image re-users to get in touch directly with the owner of the photo and secure commercial rights to use it.

Recognizing commons content and identifying its original source is an important part of our community and it’s something we’ve been thinking a lot about. Take for example, the vigilant editors and administrators of Wikimedia Commons, which serves as the multimedia backend for all of the Wikipedia projects. A good portion of their time is spent weeding out copyright violations from the newly uploaded content to the project. If they had an easy way to determine whether an incoming photo was freely CC licensed, public domain, or All Rights Reserved, their jobs could be a lot easier. While PicScout’s ImageExchange is only indexing CC BY-NC licensed photos (which Wikipedia doesn’t accept anyway), we’re looking forward to seeing the database expand its reach into other domains in order to serve more and more communities.

For now, if you’re a creative professional searching the web for new images to use in your day-to-day work, sign up with Pic Scout’s ImageExchange beta program today!

CC Network: Now with Promo Codes!

fbenenson, September 11th, 2009

One thing Nathan and John have been working on under the hood of the Creative Commons Network over the last couple of months is a promotional code system which gives us (and you) more flexibility when purchasing account subscriptions.

Starting today, when you donate $50 or more to Creative Commons ($25 for students), you’ll be sent an e-mail with a link will let you either renew your current CC Network account, or sign up with a new one.

This promo code can be used by you, or if you want, you can gift it to a friend by just forwarding them the email with the link.

Just remember, individual promo codes can only be used once so use them wisely!

Kongregate Collabs: CC-Licensed Online Gaming Development

cameron, June 3rd, 2009

Kongregate Collabs is a new service that allows game developers to connect with artists and musicians to create online games. A project of Kongregate, one of the leading indie game sites on the web, Kongregate Collabs is attempting to tap into the creative energy of Kongregate’s community of game enthusiasts.

Users are encouraged to upload both art and sounds, which can then be commented on and discussed by the community. Creators can ability to license these assets under the CC license of their choosing, making them available for the public to use in their own creations.

Kongregate Collabs just launched, so now is an opportune time to jump in, upload works, and see where the collaborative platform takes you.

UPDATE: Apologies to Kongregate and our community for the broken links – they now feed directly to the Kongregate Collabs live site.

The Official Unofficial Creative Commons Facebook Application

fbenenson, May 18th, 2009

Last weekend I spent Saturday morning writing the Creative Commons License Application for Facebook. The premise is simple: installing the application allows Facebook users choose and place a CC license badge on their profile page indicating which license they want their content to be available under. Alongside the badge is text that explains what content (Photos, Videos and Status & Profile text are currently available as options) is licensed.

This surrounding text also contains RDFa, though this is of limited utility to search engines since Facebook profiles are not yet publicly indexed.

Users also have the option to allow the application to update their status so that news of their license choice will appear in their friends’ feed. Selecting this option will help grow our application’s audience exponentially, so we would encourage you to choose it.

There are some limitations to this application and you should consider it in beta, so apologies in advance if things break or don’t work properly. Perhaps the largest limitation is that works can only be licensed on a per-profile basis. This means that you must make the decision to license all of your work of a given media type (e.g., all of your photos) under a particular CC license or none at all. Unless Facebook integrates CC license choices into their Photo application, licensing works on a per-photo basis (as users have the freedom to do on sites like Flickr and Wikimedia Commons) is not possible. Thus, this implementation of a CC licenses on Facebook is a stop-gap solution to true integration into the service. If you’ve got other ideas or find other bugs for our application, please head over to our wiki and post them.

Otherwise, go now and install the Creative Commons License Application and let your friends know that you’ve chosen a CC license for your content on Facebook!

Thanks to everyone who helped me conceptualize and test this application, and especially to the “Creative Commons on Facebook” group of 5,000+ users who kept encouraging us to move forward.

Firefox 3.1beta3 and open web multimedia

mike, March 12th, 2009

The third beta of the next version of the Firefox web browser is now available for download. For the approximately half of you reading this in a Firefox browser, the next version of Firefox will be (because the beta already is) much faster and more awesome all around (and will be released as version 3.5 to denote the significance of improvements over Firefox 3). You can help ensure the release is even better by using the beta. For the rest of you — now is a good time to get with the program.

Perhaps the most exciting feature in the future Firefox 3.5 for the commons is built-in support for the new <audio> and <video> tags and open audio and video codecs. Admittedly it isn’t easy to explain why open multimedia formats are so important for the open web — they are infrastructure, lowering a number of costs and enabling interoperability for everyone — so the benefits of widespread adoption of open formats (and opportunity costs of their lack) is systemic and largely invisible. We’re pretty comfortable with making such an argument and appreciate the challenges of doing so — though there are many concrete use cases enabled by Creative Commons licensing, we know those are the tip of the iceberg.

We’ve linked a few times to explanations of why open formats in particular are important, and back in 2004 a rant on fixing web multimedia by making audio and video on the web addressable like other items published on the web instead of opaque, which is essentially what the new tags and open formats drive at.

You can also see a few times over the past year where we’ve snuck <video> tags into blog posts for the entertainment of people on the cutting edge running Firefox 3.1 alpha and earlier betas at the time.

Miro 2.0 Launches Today

fbenenson, February 10th, 2009

Miro, the free and open source video player launched their 2.0 version today. The update has tons of new features that will help you explore video on the web, including YouTube HD, Hulu and the like. Dean writes on the Miro blog about the new chrome on 2.0:

• A beautiful, all-new widget based interface
• Browse while you watch– pop out any video to an external window (our number one requested feature)
• Miro is now faster, more responsive, and lower memory use
• You can add streaming sites like Hulu to your sidebar
• You can add download sites like Archive.org or legaltorrents.com to your sidebar and download to Miro with a single click
• Improved playlists
• New compact, sortable list view
• Better audio support

On top of the new release, Miro is rolling out a great new Miro Guide, which helps users find and download great content such as TED talks and NBC Nightly News.

Download Miro 2.0 for Windows, OS X, or Linux here.

Koblo: Online Music Collaboration

cameron, February 2nd, 2009

Koblo is a new online music collaboration site that utilizes CC licensing on tracks and song stems to promote community remixing and reuse. Uniquely, Koblo exists beyond the web in the form of Koblo Studio, a free and opensource software DAW that has the ability to upload projects to Koblo’s community site with all the tracks prepped and ready for remixing. It is during this upload process that a CC license can be chosen for the project.

By offering a platform that exists not only as open source software but also allows for CC licensing of material, Koblo has set an exemplary model for their community to follow as it grows in regards to the sharing of content. Related is the Koblo Shop, an online store that will allow community members to sell their remix packs, plugins, loops, and beats in the coming months – the store is already live with preliminary content, including a CC BY-NC-SA licensed remix pack from Sweedish pop band Ace of Base.

Koblo joins an ever growing list of great online music platforms that are enabling unintended and unique collaboration through the use of new technologies and the permissive licensing allowed by CC licenses.

Runes of Gallidon, CC-Licensed Online Fantasy World, Launches Public Beta

cameron, January 26th, 2009

The Hunt, Andy Underwood/Runes of Gallidon | CC BY-NC-SA

Runes of Gallidon is a “user-generated online fantasy world of swords, magic, adventure and mystery” that just launched in public beta. Distinguishing Runes of Gallidon from other virtual worlds is the decision to license all the content in the ROG universe under a CC BY-NC-SA license. Any work that the community creates is kept free and open for the rest of the community to use and build upon, a choice that allows the plot lines and characters of Runes of Gallidon to evolve naturally and legally.

While the ROG universe evolves through user-submitted content, Brain Candy, LLC (the group behind Runes of Gallidon) will be doing legwork to turn Rules of Gallidon into a source of potential revenue, namely in film/TV and merchandise will be marketing the website to help audiences find the creative community’s Gallidon works (content creators have the ability to shop their ideas to interested parties as well). The monetary gains from these endeavors will be split between community and Brain Candy in two distinct ways:

If Brain Candy, LLC, prints your story in a book, prints a poster, a T-shirt, etc. and makes any money directly from your Work, you receive 50% of the money. If you sell your Work set in Runes of Gallidon (a published book, album cover art, posters, etc.), we ask that you contribute to Brain Candy, LLC 10% of the money you receive.

That is the basic formula: each Artisan owns the Work they create, but the world of Runes of Gallidon and everything in it is shared by the entire Gallidon creative community.

This is a unique implementation to our CC+ protocol and a fresh approach to crafting an online fantasy world. By using CC licenses, the group behind Runes of Gallidon have created a hybrid-economy where the sharing of content (enabled by CC licenses) is monetized based on an additional set of legal guidelines, in turn encouraging growth through legal protection and an opportunity for monetary gain.

Bandcamp Integrates CC-Licenses

cameron, January 21st, 2009

Bandcamp, a feature-heavy music site that focuses on providing musicians with robust, easy-to-use, and visually pleasing artist pages, just integrated CC licensing options in to their UI:

Hugs and kisses backatchu JD, and everyone else who requested Creative Commons support, then patiently worked around its absence by putting CC links in their tracks’ credits or about fields, slapping CC marks in their header graphics, and other reasonable zaniness. Situation rectified: starting today, you can select a CC license right from the Edit Track page.

[…]
Creative Commons’ mission is “to increase the amount of creativity… in ‘the commons’ — the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing.” A worthy goal, we think, so if © strikes you as too restrictive, we hope you’ll take a gander at the various licenses and find something that better captures the freedoms you want your work to carry.

At a basic level, we aim to have licensing be as simple and easy as possible, a goal that is more fully accomplished when content-sharing sites like Bandcamp integrate CC license options directly into their UI. Kudos to Bandcamp for the integration and much thanks to all the Bandcamp users who requested it in the first place. You can learn more about Bandcamp at their FAQ page – to see the licenses in action, check out this artist page from Paul and Storm.

New web metadata validator released

paulproteus, January 6th, 2009

(This was originally published on CC Labs.)

This past summer, Hugo Dworak worked with us (thanks to Google Summer of Code) on a new validator. This work was greatly overdue, and we are very pleased that Google could fund Hugo to work on it. Our previous validator had not been updated to reflect our new metadata standards, so we disabled it some time ago to avoid creating further confusion. The textbook on CC metadata is the “Creative Commons Rights Expression Language”, or ccREL, which specifies the use of RDFa on the web. (If this sounds like keyword soup, rest assured that the License Engine generates HTML that you can copy and paste; that HTML is fully compliant with ccREL.) We hoped Hugo’s work on a new validator would let us offer a validator to the Creative Commons community so that publishers can test their web pages to make sure they encode the information they intended.

Hugo’s work was a success; he announced in August 2008 a test version of the validator. He built on top of the work of others: the new validator uses the Pylons web framework, html5lib for HTML parsing and tokenizing, and RDFlib for working with RDF. He shared his source code under the recent free software license built for network services, AGPLv3.

So I am happy to announce that the test period is complete, and we are now running the new code at http://validator.creativecommons.org/. Our thanks go out to Hugo, and we look forward to the new validator gaining some use as well as hearing your feedback. If you want to contribute to the validator’s development or check it out for any reason, take a look at the documentation on the CC wiki.