Open Media Planet

Big Buck Bunny, a short 3D animated film produced by the Amsterdam-based ‘Blender Institute‘ (who we have praised previously), was recentlly posted for download online. Debuted publicly back in March (our own Jon Phillips spoke before the premier), the film is being released online under the non-restrictive CC BY license as a means to widely [...]

Between twittering, blogging, founding copyfighting organizations, starting free culture chapters, and attending law school, frothing open source advocate Brian Rowe has moved his headquarters to CC’s San Francisco office to hone his legal research skillz. He will spend the summer crawling through the muck of works with multiple licenses for different resolutions, slicing [...]

In a provocative interview with Cory Doctorow about his new book Little Brother, the non-satirical Onion A.V. club investigates the blogger cum sci-fi author’s motivations and strategies for convincing his publisher to simultaneously release his young adult book under CC and hardcover: AVC: Was the Creative Commons release strategy a hard sell with Tor that first [...]

Came across this awesome business that’s been building up traction in Japan called C-shirt — powered by media-wiki company Nota that leverages Creative Commons licensing in a pretty unconventional way. At first glance, it might seem like one of the innumerable t-shirt vendor sites out there — but it is, in fact, way, way cooler. First, [...]

Over on the Science Commons blog, Donna Wentworth writes: People make chairs more productively, hamburgers more productively, cars more productively, everything else in the world except medicines. — Aled Edwards, Director and CEO of the Structural Genomics Consortium (via CBC News Canada) The drug discovery process is badly broken. Despite the scientific and technological advances that make [...]

Jono Bacon, the Community Manager for Ubuntu and full-time metal head, recently announced a new musical project he is undertaking, SeveredFifth. SeveredFifth is Jono’s new music project with the aims of seeing how far one musician can take the concept of Free (as in Freedom) music. Jono: “Severed Fifth is really here to ask questions - both [...]

Along with the rest of the interns that descended on CC San Francisco offices a few days ago I’ve been requested to do one post introducing myself to the world before getting fully underway at the blog. So, without further ado… Hi! I’m Tim Hwang. I got involved in IP freedom and tech policy issues while [...]

If all goes according to plan this should be my first post on the Creative Commons blog.  I’m going to take this opportunity to introduce myself and tell you why you are going to have see my posts in the future. My name is Greg Grossmeier and I am the Community Development Intern at Creative Commons [...]

Drupalcon Szeged 2008 registration opened earlier today, and some of the early birds are already in! We announced and explained pricing ten days ago. As we detailed, you can buy tickets for 80 EUR until the end of the month, and the price will increase to 120 EUR in July, move to 160 EUR at the start of August and end up as 200 EUR for people showing up without pre-paying.

Today, we launched the ticket registration system and several other components, which make up our Drupalcon registration process. We are not only selling tickets, you can optionally sign up for quite a few other things. We promised to sell shuttle bus seats, and although we did not manage to go below the train ticket prices, this service should be useful for those, who prefer to pre-organize their travel online, make sure to go with Drupalcon fellows from Budapest, and/or arrive too early or too late to take the train. We also offer hundreds of rooms in 18 different locations. Each location is mapped, we have directions from the locations to the venue, and pictures and website links where possible. Except around a dozen rooms, all have wired or wireless internet access, and we negotiated breakfast for you even in pensions, where these are otherwise not available.

We know some people would happily pay a bit more for the Drupalcon to further ensure its good quality or even sponsor give-away tickets for those, who otherwise cannot afford it. Therefore we added a way for each attendee to optionally sponsor the conference, getting a nice and exclusive t-shirt in the process. Finally, our organization partner, C&T prepared some tour ideas for you. You can sign up and express your interests in these options. If there is enough people signing up, C&T will organize the tours and discuss payment with you.

We heard that some people experience high flight prices, so additionally to trying to get good deals and putting our hands on hundreds of rooms to make sure you get what you want, we built in another nice feature: room sharing. Most of our rooms have multiple beds, so to cut your costs (and in true geek fashion), you can share your rooms and discuss sharing costs with your roommates. This is of course completely optional. Don't have colleagues coming with you to share rooms with, but still looking for someone to share with? Check your profile and make sure to mark yourself as looking to share your room with someone else. People will be able to contact you on your contact tab and discuss sharing with you. Another way to optimize your costs this Drupalcon!

There are two methods to pay. You can pay by PayPal, which allows you to use your PayPal account or credit card to complete the process. Our system keeps track of the transaction and upon feedback from PayPal informs you that you are all set. It is also possible to pay by bank (wire) transfer, in which case you would transfer the money to the bank account of C&T and route the money with the special message we provide you to end up in this event's pool. Finally, you can always check your registration status (including whether you were marked as roommate for a room) on your registration status page (under My account).

All-in-all, this is the time to register for Drupalcon Szeged! We hope to meet you in the hallways, the socializing spaces and the session rooms at the end of August.

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Hyper awesome super CC-evangelist Cory Doctorow has had two great bits of news pop up in the past couple days, with the first being that his new novel, Little Brother (CC BY-NC-SA) has entered its 4th week on the New York Times Bestseller List! A huge accomplishment in its own right, we are especially excited [...]

And, you can be too! 2008 is half over. Seriously, this is a massively overdue in praise, adulation and support for Tim “TVOL” Vollmer and Rebecca “RRR” Rojer who started last summer 2007 at Creative Commons as interns along with the oustanding still-CC-blog-superstar Cameron Parkins tasked with specific projects all have seen through this blog. Rebecca [...]

We wanted to recognize and celebrate the hard work and talent of musicians all over the world registering their songs under cc licenses - so we now feature a handful of such songs on CC’s Myspace page. CC’s page on this social network site receives a steady flow of visitors each day, and posting songs [...]

The ccNewsletter #7 is now available for download. This edition highlights Science Commons, the project of Creative Commons dedicated to bringing the sharing and reuse principles CC brought to the world of culture, to scientific research. Also, a BIG thank you to CC Philippines for designing the newsletter and to all of you for keeping up [...]

Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software is a new book by Christopher Kelty that explores the “history and cultural significance of Free Software”, narrating a time line about “the people and practices that have transformed not only software, but also music, film, science, and education” in contemporary society. Released in print by Duke [...]

Lingro is a project that aims to create an online environment that will allow anyone, in reading a foreign language website, a quick and easy means to translate words they don’t understand. Simple in concept, yet profound in implication, Lingro (which we have blogged about twice before) uses open dictionaries and user-submitted, CC BY-SA licensed, [...]

Back in 2004, Athabasca University released the e-version of the Theory and Practice of Online Learning for free online. Now the second edition of the book is out, also available in eBook form under the same license, CC BY-NC-ND. All chapters of the book have been updated with an addition of four new chapters on stuff [...]

Thanks to The Wired Campus, I recently stumbled across this new wiki whilst looking for a visualization tool for a ccLearn research project. The new wiki is called Digital Research Tools, also known as DiRT. DiRT is edited by a team of librarians from Rice University’s Digital Media Center and Sam Houston State University’s Newton [...]

CC got a nice plug in a recent article in The Art Newspaper, highlighted in regards to the 36th Annual Conference on Legal Issues in Museum Administration that took place in early April: Sharon Farb, associate university librarian at UCLA Library in Los Angeles, said that as museums put more images and content online, more users [...]

Musiquetes is a new collection of CC-licensed children’s songs by cultura lliure, the same group that published the amazing Música lliure and Música lliure II. The songs are released under a CC BY-NC license, ported for both France and Spain as the project is aimed at groups in both countries. Supported by La Bressola, an association [...]

Will consumer pressure for a safer net mean the end of open platforms and rapid innovation? And should the geeks who “get” the net care if the rest of the world prefer TiVos and iPhones? On Wednesday of this week we co-hosted an event at the British Computer Society to discuss the problems raised by Professor [...]