Monthly Archives: May 2009

If you can’t make it to Old Parliament House in Canberra today, don’t worry because a small but dedicated group of bloggers and tweeters will be posting live during the Copyright Future – Copyright Freedom conference.

You can follow the official Creative Commons Australia twitter account (@ccAustralia) or the official hashtag (#CopyrightFuture09) to keep up with where things are at. A number of users are tweeting, so dip in: follow ccAustralia staffer Elliott Bledsoe (@elliottbledsoe), OAK Law‘s Kylie Pappalardo (@kyles_p) and QUT Law lecturer Peter Black (@PeterBlackQUT). If you’re tweeting find Elliott and let him know.

UPDATING LIST OF TWEETERS

We will be posting an updated list of tweeters here:

- Peter Giles (@dziga)

Elliott and Kylie will also be attempting to blog during the conference. Check out their respective blogs here and here for updates.
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I’m sure you’ve all heard by now, cause the internet’s abuzz, but just in case – the Wikimedia community has officially voted to add a Creative Commons licence to all their wikis. The Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) licence, to be exact.

This is possibly the biggest Creative Commons development since it launched in 2002, and great boon to the free culture community. As I pointed out in my previous post on the vote, what this means is that the Wikimedia wikis will now be dual licensed under both BY-SA and the GNU Free Documentation Licence (GFDL – which Wikimedia currently uses), giving people moving material to and from the wikis the ability choose which licence they want to use. This means that the 6 million+ articles available on Wikipedia and Wikimedia’s other wikis (including Wiktionary, Wikinews, and Wikiquote) will be able to be more easily combined with the 160 million+ works that use Creative Commons licences.
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Since signing the Capetown Declaration on Open Education in 2007 Otago Polytechnic in Dunedin, New Zealand, has been without question the regional leader in open education.

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Those with an astute eye will have noticed a new banner at the top of our website advertising CC’s Case Studies campaign. We’re trying to build up a picture of how people are using CC across the globe. So if you use the CC licences on your blog/video/music/book/aggregate/indefinable thing, or know someone who does, we want to hear from you!

From the CC International blog:

With upwards of 150 million CC-licensed works published from every corner of the world, no single use case can tell the whole story. Creators and users come to CC for different reasons, and for many, CC solves different problems. We’re trying to capture the diversity of CC creators and content by building a resource that inspires new works and informs free culture.

Creative Commons Case Studies 2009 kicks off today – and we want to hear your story! We’re collecting cases big and small on our re-launched Case Studies wiki, an online portal to upload and discover documentation about CC-licensed projects.

The top community curated stories will be featured on our website and in the next printed volume of Creative Commons Case Studies. You’ll also collaborate with our CEO, Joi Ito, whose doctoral work focuses on select case studies about CC and the sharing economy.

To celebrate the campaign we here at CCau have re-launched our case studies book Building an Australasian Commons in a new, remix friendly form.
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As you all run off for the Labour Day long weekend, we thought we’d suggest some CC activities to fill the long empty hours.

Why not spend your weekend turning something old into something new as part of the first exciting CC remix challenge coming out of ABC Pool‘s new Pitch a project forum? The forum is designed to give Pool users the opportunity to use the site to start and manage their own ideas. Notoriousruz (one of the finalists for CCau’s Pooling Ideas competition) has suggested a recurring remix challenge based around CC works – “Someone picks 3 CC elements, at least 1 must come from the pool, then we have 2 weeks to make something”. The winner, as chosen by votes in the forum, gets to choose the elements for the next challenge. Rossco (the Pool Ideas winner) has come up with the first elements: a face, a place and a space. Entries due 9 May – but if you miss that deadline, there’ll be another after.

Or if you want something more sedentary for your long weekend, curl up on a couch with Thoughtcrime Experiments, the new anthology of fantasy and sci fi writing that’s just been released under CC BY-NC-SA. Download it, print it, send it to your friends. Or if you can find the energy, mash up your favourite bits. It’s all allowed.

Or for those of a more cerebral bent (and the real copyright geeks out there), get enraged by Consumer International’s IP Watch List. It rates different countries on how well their IP laws protect consumer rights (as a bit of a counter for the US Government’s famously protection-biased 301 Report). Australia hasn’t faired too well – only 8 out of 16. This article at IT News explains why – it argues that with the USFTA we’ve adopted all the worse bits of US law (eg long copyright terms and strict anti-circumvention laws) without the good bits (fair use). In fact, thanks to fair use the US actually does pretty well – it ranks 4th on the list. After India, South Korea and China, all of which receive ‘bad’ marks in the 301 Report.

Have a good long weekend, all!
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