Wikis Take Manhattan III is this Saturday!
Wikis Take Manhattan is a scavenger hunt and free content photography contest aimed at illustrating Wikipedia and StreetsWiki articles covering sites and street features in Manhattan and across the five boroughs of New York City.
Scheduled for Saturday, October 10, 2009, this event will be a sequel to the spring 2008 Wikipedia Takes Manhattan (WTM-1) and last fall’s Wikis Take Manhattan (WTM-2) event. Check out the hoppin’ Wikipedia page for full details.
The day will be sponsored by Free Culture @ Columbia, the Columbia University chapter of Students for Free Culture, in cooperation with Free Culture @ NYU, The Open Planning Project, Wikimedia New York City and Wikipedia volunteers.
If you’re attending, make sure to register online here.
All Wikipedians and non-Wikipedians are invited to participate in teams of up to three (no special knowledge is required at all, just a digital camera and a love of the city).
No Comments »We Have Band: “You Came Out” Video Stills Released Under CC-License
We_Have_Band 1709, we_have_band | CC BY-SA
We Have Band, and electro-pop act from London, recently released a great new video for their single You Came Out in collaboration with creative agency Wieden + Kennedy. The video is stop frame animated and composed of 4,816 still images, all of which are CC BY-SA licensed and available on We Have Band’s flickr page. This allows fans of the band the ability to reanimate the video and reuse the images as long as they attribute We Have Band and share derivative works under the same license.
Find out more about the single at the band’s mysapce blog, including ordering info.
2 Comments »Cadyou Takes CC to CAD & Digital Design
All sorts of interesting things show up in our Twitter search feed, and yesterday we were thrilled to come across Cadyou via @sketchupshop. Cadyou is a community launched by Tom Moor in late 2008 whose goal is to create a resource of free, high quality files for everyone to use, available in the Public Domain and under Creative Commons licenses. One interesting component of Cadyou’s content is its moderation policy:
Unlike many websites which let user upload their own content, cadyou is moderated ensuring that each file made available reaches quality standards, is tagged well and has great thumbnails so it is easy to find what you need.
Sign up today for unlimited free downloads!
1 Comment »Yahoo Brings CC Filters to Image Search
Forgive me, but a picture (screen shot) is worth a thousand words (searches):
Today, on Yahoo’s Search Blog, Polly Ng and Anuj Sahai announced the addition of CC license image filtering options to their image search and also explained why CC licenses are so important for finding images online:
Finding a great image online elicits a little thrill, but it can be tricky – if you’re looking for a pic to pop into a presentation or illustrate a Web page, you need to know if you’re allowed to use that photo, and how you can use it. Today, Yahoo! Image Search is launching a Creative Commons license filter that allows you to simply and quickly find images that are available for reuse.
When you use Yahoo! Image Search, you’ll now see a checkbox for Creative Commons allowing you to filter for images from Flickr that can be used commercially or that can be modified (remixed, tweaked, or built upon) with restrictions set by the image’s creator.
Congrats to the Yahoo! team for extending CC even further into their platform!
2 Comments »Flickr Uses CC Zero for their Shapefiles
Rounding out the week of some exciting CC announcements, we wanted to pass along news of Flickr’s use of our CC Zero waiver for their shapefile dataset.
“What is a shapefile?” you may ask. Its a file containing shapes mathematically generated by the thousands of Flickr geotagged photos of particular neighborhoods, countries, and continents. The data can also be seen as reverse-engineered fuzzy maps created by user generated longitude and latitude coordinates that are then demarcated by Where-On-Earth IDs.
Still confused? Its 549mb of uncompressed XML public domain geo-glory. Aaron from the Flickr Development team explains their rationale for using CC Zero:
- We want people (developers, researchers and anyone else who wants to play) to find new and interesting ways to use the shapefiles and we recognize that, in many cases, this means having access to the entire dataset.
- We want people to feel both comfortable and confident using this data in their projects and so we opted for a public domain [waiver] so no one would have to spend their time wondering about the issue of licensing. We also think the work that the Creative Commons crew is doing is valuable and important and so we chose to release the shapefiles under the CC0 waiver as a show of support.
- We want people to create their own shapefiles and to share them so that other people (including us!) can find interesting ways to use them. We’re pretty sure there’s something to this “shapefile stuff” even if we can’t always put our finger on it so if publishing the dataset will encourage others to do the same then we’re happy to do so.
Thanks to the Flickr team for the show of support! Download the compressed XML shapefile here, or read more about the release here.
2 Comments »Davos World Economic Forum’s Photos Under CC-BY-SA
There’s great news over at the Davos World Economic Forum blog:
We have just uploaded 300 of our best pictures from the Annual Meeting 2009 in Davos to the World Economic Forum’s Flickr account. Admittedly it took us some time to choose the best pictures from the thousands shot by our official photographers from Swiss-Image. My colleague Dafni Kokkidi spent the past week adding descriptions, tags and geo tags to all the photos. But it was well worth it, because these 300 high-resolution portrait shots are available for anyone to download in all sizes. Best of all, these pictures are licensed under the Creative Commons licence (BY-SA 3.0) meaning you can use them for free on your blog, on your website, in print and even for commercial purposes under the condition that you credit the World Economic Forum. We also uploaded the best pictures from our regional summits such as the recent World Economic Forum on Latin America in Rio.
Many of these photos have already made their way over to Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia, so they’ll probably be making an appearance in your favorite world leader’s article soon. Thanks to Davos for their substantial contribution to the commons!
No Comments »Why Did the White House Choose Attribution and not Public Domain?
The microblogs have been a-buzz this morning about news of the launch of the official White House Flickr stream featuring photos from Obama’s first 100 days in office. While the photos are licensed under our Attribution license, one could make the very strong argument that they’re actually in the public domain and can be used without attribution (though one would have to be careful and respect the personality rights of the private citizens featured in some of the photos). The photos are likely in the public domain because they are works created by the federal government and not entitled to copyright protection. As you might recall, the Whitehouse.gov’s copyright notice indicates as much.
Why would the White House then choose Attribution for their Flickr stream? Simple, unlike communities like Wikipedia and Thingiverse, Flickr doesn’t allow their photographers to choose Public Domain as an option to release their work to the world. So the Obama team must have picked the next best option: Attribution only.
7 Comments »3 copies left: Joi Ito’s Free Souls
A month ago, we announced that Flickr had surpassed 100 million CC licensed photos. In celebration of this milestone, we offered a limited number of Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito’s book, Free Souls, at the $100 donation level and above. There are only three copies left, so now is your chance to support CC and secure a copy of this beautiful limited edition book celebrating a free and open culture of sharing.
Thank you to everyone who has already donated and received the book, and to all of our wonderful supporters who make success stories like the 100 million CC licensed Flickr photos possible!
Update: The last copies of Free Souls are gone! If you’d like to support CC and buy art, Matt Jones’ Get Excited And Make Things prints are still available, or head over to the Support CC site and make a regular donation, with regular (ultracool) CC swag available!
No Comments »20×200 benefit edition a great success; prints still available
Thank you to 20×200, designer Matt Jones, and everyone who supported CC by purchasing one of these special edition prints, released on April 7. We are proud to announce that the edition did extremely well: all 200 of the 8×10 prints sold out within a day, and the other sizes available at different prices were very popular as well. There are still prints remaining, and all proceeds will continue to benefit CC, so if you would like to show some support for CC, head over to the 20×200 site and secure one of these exhibition-quality prints for yourself (they’d also make great gifts!): size 11″x14″ for $50, 16″x20″ for $200, and 24″x30″ for $1,000.
We are delighted that Matt Jones has chosen Creative Commons to benefit from the sale of his special edition prints, and as always, we thank everyone who has supported CC over the years, allowing us to continue our work supporting artists, educators, scientists, and creators of all kinds all over the world.
No Comments »Braithwaite’s CC Licensed Wallets
Braithwaite creates men’s wallets whose PDF designs are CC licensed. Their model really exemplifies the kind of thinking we’re seeing a lot of these days – set the digital versions free and offer the unique physical goods and experience for a price. Braithwaite explains their decision as follows:
As of April 14, 2009, we have used Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License to license our unique wallet designs allowing anyone to distribute, copy, or produce them as long as authorship credit is retained. The right to use our designs does include commercial use.
Since there are no ‘patents’ in regards to the fashion industry, we have decided to blow the lid off with our work by making it freely available to anyone. This also allows our designers to retain the rights to their work. When designers submit their work to us, we recommend that they first license it with Creative Commons to make sure their rights are protected.
You can download the wallet designs on the pages of their respective designers, and orders begin shipping April 22nd.
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