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Monthly Archives: May 2010
“For free and not illegally!”—A great big happy birthday to Mayer and Bettle
This week marks the fifth birthday of ccAustralia’s fabulous animated mascots, Mayer and Bettle. So we thought it was a good time to give them a bit of love.
I’m sure you’re all fans, but for those new to CC, Mayer and Bettle are the stars of a 5 minute animation, first commissioned for the QUT Smart Train back in 2005 to provide a simple and friendly introduction to CC. Created jointly by local animation team Blackbrow (aka Pete Foley and Chris Perren) and our own Elliott Bledsoe, the film has the little blue guys travel through land, sea and space while discussing what Creative Commons is and how it works. In 2008 Mayer and Bettle returned in glorious 3D in a sequel, joining Bettle’s biggest fan, Flik, in a through the looking glass CC world to talk about how to apply the CC licences to your material.
Credits—Still: From ‘Mayer and Bettle‘ by Creative Commons Australia and Blackbrow, CC BY-SA 2.0 Australia.
Posted in Arts and Creativity, Video Tagged Blackbrow, Chris Perren, Elliott Bledsoe, Mayer and Bettle, Pete Foley, QUT Smart Train Leave a comment
“Yes, We’re Open!”: A Special Issue of Platform Journal – Call for Papers Reminder
A quick reminder for all the commons-based postgraduate researchers out there – abstracts are due this Monday for the special “Yes, We’re Open!” issue of Platform.
The issue, guest edited by the ccAustralia and ccClinic teams, will focus on the mainstreaming of “open”. With Mozilla Firefox pushing towards a 25% share of the web browser market and the number of Creative Commons licensed works reaching more than 250 million in 2009, perhaps it is time to ask, ‘Is “open” the new black?’
Credits—Photo: Adaptation (crop and resize) of ‘Untitled‘ by pheezy, CC BY 2.0 Generic.
Show us the money! Oz Budget under CC
In the debate over the merits of last night’s conservative budget, there’s one thing we’d argue Swan did get right – the licensing.
The entire budget has been released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. This means the material it contains – the deficit strategy, the fiscal aggregates, the government’s responses to the economic crisis – is all available for free reuse, by anyone, for any purpose, as long as the source is attributed.
A single document, even one that’s 350 pages long, may not seem like that big a deal compared to some of the other open government initiatives over the last few years – like the release of the Australian Bureau of Statistic’s entire store of census data under CC. But as a public endorsement of CC as the licence of choice for the Australian Federal Government, it’s huge.
Following the strong support for open access in the government’s response to the Gov 2.0 report last week, this is a great show of the government putting its money where its mouth is (sorry, I couldn’t resist). In fact, the last week has seen the release of three major Federal Government reports – the Budget, the Gov 2.0 response and the NBN Implementation Study – all under CC licences. This seems to be a great indicator that the government really means what it says – open access is going to be the default position for the Australian Federal Government from now on.
Bring on the remixes, mashups and YouTube tributes!
Update: And for those interested, a couple of good articles on the budget’s CC licensing by Craig Thomler and Computerworld
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Australian Federal Government Commits to Open Access
Design by Ben Crothers of Catch Media CC BY 2.5
Big news from the Australian Federal Government on the issue of access to public sector information (PSI).
CCau followers will remember the Government 2.0 Taskforce report released in December last year, which gave Creative Commons a very big tick as the licensing model of choice for Australian PSI. The Federal Government’s official response to the report was released yesterday and is generally positive, with the Federal Government agreeing (at least substantially) to 12 of the 13 recommendations to come out of the report.
