creative commons through the looking glass

Before the Inauguration of President Barack Obama I posted about his administration's decision to release Change.gov⎯the website of the Office of the President-Elect⎯under a Creative Commons licence. Of course US government material is automatically public domain, but the 501(c)(4) set up to transition Obama into The White House was not technically speaking a government agency so its content was copyrightable.

Over on the ccAustralia website I just posted about the Australia Council for the Arts recently released The Writer’s Guide to Making a Digital Living: Choose Your own Adventure by Therese Fingleton, Christy Dena, Jennifer Wilson over at at The Australia Council. It is very heartening to see that The Australia Council is engaging with the Web 2.0 space and more importantly encouraging and supporting creative practitioners moving into and operating within this space.

As I said on the ccAustralia site, The Writer's Guide includes information about the new media industry, what opportunities and possibilities that creates for writers and how to take advantage of them (business and planning skills). It also includes guides to promotion, distribution and copyright. Then all this is complimented by a set of case studies, audio and video resources and a great 'new media myth busters' section which every writer should read! There's even an interview about Creative Commons and writers in the Web 2.0 environment that Amy Barker from Remix My Lit and I did which I had totally forgotten about.

Personally I want to thank and commend Therese Fingleton, Manager of the Story of the Future program which is responsible for The Writer's Guide. The crew at ccAustralia may have done a little bit of helping out with licensing the guide, but that was definitely Therese's initiative! We thank her for her foresight and leadership on this. The entire The Writer's Guide is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia Licence.

But perhaps my favourite part of the entire project is the promotional video. It exudes a witty dry humor something like a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy–The World Around Us hybrid. Brilliance:


Although, I am not too sure what is with the aeroplane encircled by the two snakes is all about?!?

UPDATE: It has come to my attention that the snakes and plane logo is of course the logo to the film Snakes on a Plane released by New Line Cinema. The film of course made news not just because it included Samuel L Jackson, but because it also incorporated content based on feedback from online users. Thanks for the heads up Tim!

The Writer's Guide comes as interactive media, HTML and as a PDF on The Australia Council website.

This blog is of course about Creative Commons but occasionally I am prone to wander. At least talking about the public domain, like I am going to do right now, is related. In particular, I want to talk again about the Flickr: The Commons project.

In the last few months the Australian War Memorial and the State Library of New South Wales joined Powerhouse Museum, Sydney on The Commons, bring the tally of Australian institutions contributing public domain images to the the repository to three. Imagine if every library, museum, archive and institution here in Australia were.

I guess it is easy to say 'Who cares' to an initiative like this. Lots of old photos have been available for viewing in a number of libraries for years, doesn't mean anyone really looks at them. As I have argued many times with people in governments and institutions, just making content available, even available online from government websites, does not mean that people are going to:

1. know it is there;
2. look for it; and
3. find it.

Government information is more useful when it is placed where people already go rather than expecting people to come and get it from the government. Flickr: The Commons is a brilliant example of a number of government run institutions recognising this and acting on it. Many of the institutions involved with Flickr: The Commons have their own extensive photo libraries accessible online, but arguably by placing them on Flickr they have been accesses far more than via the institutions' own online interfaces.

On the blog of the Library of Congress, the inaugural institution on The Commons, they say:

If all goes according to plan, the [Flickr: The Commons] project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity.

And how? The entry goes on to say The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. On the same idea, here's what George Oates from Flickr had to say on the Flickr blog:

There are about 20 million unique tags on Flickr today. 20 million! They are the bread and butter of what makes our search work so beautifully. Simply by association, tags create emergent collections of words that reinforce meaning. You can see this in our clusters around words like tiger, sea, jump, or even turkey.

What if we could lend this wonderful power to some of the huge reference collections around the world? What if you could contribute your own description of a certain photo in, say, the Library of Congress’ vast photographic archive, knowing that it might make the photo you’ve touched a little easier to find for the next person?

We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images.

Like I said on the ccAustralia website, you could just read the War Memorial's copyright statement on their website for insight into their decision to release out of copyright images on Flickr, but Melbourne teacher librarian and blogger, Rhondda Powling does a superb job of outlining the War Memorial's sentiments on Rhondda's Reflections.


Talking about the photo above, of a group of an unidentified members of the Australian Headquarter’s staff taken by Captain James Francis Hurley, she says:

Wouldn’t it be great if these men could be identified and their story told. What about the young people sharing this with older members of their families. Who knows where it could lead? Doesn’t it make for some interesting ideas for research assignments for students, or creative writing, telling a story that might have been. It could combine historical research and creative writing for English. The books of Anthony Hills or Ken Catran, or the My story series could be used as examples.

This is exactly what Flickr: The Commons exists to do.

I want more

So you want more on the Flickr: The Commons project. Here's some stuff worth looking at:

• Australian War Memorial photostream on Flickr: LINK
• State Library of New South Wales photostream on Flickr: LINK
  
• Seb Chan from Powerhouse Museum, Sydney has an excellent entry on the potential of the project on the image services blog, Fresh + New(er): LINK
• Paul Hagon's succinct explanation of why Flickr: The Commons is different to The National Library's Picture Australia Flickr groups: LINK
• Entries tagged 'flickrcommons' on the Brooklyn Museum's blogs: LINK
• Entries tagged 'the commons' on the National Library of New Zealand's LibraryTeachNZ blog: LINK

How exciting! American President-elect Barack Obama has taken a bold but very welcomed move, deciding to release the content of the Office of the President-Elect website, Change.gov, under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (interestingly a BY 3.0 Unported, not a BY 3.0 United States, I wonder why that is?). Both Creative Commons and Lawrence Lessig are happily reporting this exciting new too. Perhaps this is signs of things to come?

The Change.gov Copyright Notice states:

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Content includes all materials posted by the Obama-Biden Transition project. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Change.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

What is important about this is true openness. It is not just a superficial gesture towards open and transparent government. The choice of licensing under an Attribution licence–the most permissive and liberal CC licence–demonstrates a real commitment to ensuring that. Sure, §105 of the American Copyright Law means that lots of stuff government owned is in the public domain, but if I remember rightly there are some exceptions for certain agencies. Is the transition organisation exempt? I don't know. Likewise, won't most of it move into the public domain after Inauguration? I don't know enough about the exceptions to tell you. Regardless, any contributions from members of the public well most certainly gain domestic copyright protection and this is a way to ensure that they stay open.

UPDATE: The entry at Creative Commons clarifies this:

Several people have pointed out that “works created by an agency of the United States government are public domain at the moment of creation” (see Wikipedia for more on this). Change.gov is not currently the project of a government agency, but a 501(c)(4) that has been set up to manage the Obama-Biden transition. Also, the public is being invited to contribute their own comments and works to the site, and it is important to have a clear marking of the permissions that other people have to this material.

Ok so this is not strictly about Creative Commons, free culture, open access or any of the other things this blog focuses on. But I am doing Movember this year, the international fundraising event which sees men from around the world sporting fetching moustaches to raise money and awareness for prostate cancer and depression.

Being the firm believer in participatory decision making that I am, I couldn't make the decision on which mo to make a part of my attire so I thought I would leave it up to you. Head over to my other blog and cast your vote to determine what the hair on my upper lip will look like. Voting closes next Monday!

A somewhat throw-away comment on Lawrence Lessig blog yesterday made me start to wonder if Creative Commons is really a community. Not in a negative way. Read on and you'll get what I mean.

Lessig was commenting on Pomona College Associate Professor of English and Media Studies Kathleen Fitzpatrick's positive review of his new book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy on the Barnes & Noble site, and how that had made his day a lot better than Spencer E Ante's scathing and uninteresting review on the BusinessWeek site had.


International for the launch of Creative Commons Hong Kong he recounted how he had added a Flickr image of the book's cover to the entry about Ante's review to "distract from the Spencer review." He went on to say:

I didn't know the photographer, and certainly didn't know where she was from. I'm not even quite sure how I even came across the image. But after my talk here in Hong Kong, she came up to me. She had seen the image on my blog.

He called this the "most amazing fact of the day" and it is!

Relationships are developed through social interactions. Such interactions include some form of exchange whether this takes the form of time spent together, exchanging actual goods (such as the proverbial cup of sugar borrowed), exchanging information, etc. [2]

For Creative Commons, the licensing and marking of content as having "some rights reserved" is the mechanism through which sharing takes place. But unlike real-world communities, "...where the “coin of the realm” for relationship building often includes the ritual sharing or exchange of [physical]“things”" [3], "things" within the Creative Commons community are not as directly shared. For example, if I ask my neighbour for the proverbial cup of sugar (and they agree to 'share' their sugar supply with me) I am given directly, by them, a cup of sugar. Compare this to the experience of sharing using Creative Commons. I make my photos available on Flickr under an Attribution licence. Rather than my neighbour coming over to my place to request my images, I have preempted the request (some might argue prematurely and superficially since I do not know if anyone actually wants them) and already granted my neighbour and everyone else permission. Often the experience of sharing using CC doesn't involve any direct interaction between the parties sharing.

This is compounded further by the fact that Creative Commons, unlike other communities online, lacks direct membership (although the ccNetwork may change that over time). Unlike social networks which, like geographic communities, have a boundary (ie you must log in to be part of the community), Creative Commons is not restricted to any one platform, nor for that matter to just the virtual environment. For the real-world and virtual 'gated communities' "some people belong, others do not," as University of North Carolina at Greensboro academics Julia Hersberge, Kevin Rioux and Ray Cruitt note. "Isolation and rejection can be the negative outcome of boundary setting."

I know that one of the philosophical underpinnings of Creative Commons and other Open Content Licensing models is to not discriminate, which is why they are available to anyone. But for members of the Creative Commons community the real possibility of feeling alone and isolated within the community can be strong. With no central 'community hub' and a very dispersed community it can be difficult to be recognised as being part of the community at all.

To me, it is because of this that Creative Commons has such a vibrant set of subcommunities; CC users on Flickr, Deviant Art, ccMixter, educators in support of Open Educational Resources, meet up (at official CC events, events run by other organisations and unofficially) and a number of others. To me, the fact that through Creative Commons Lessig and laihiu were not just able to share content with each other, but that indirectly that formed into a direct relational bond to one another. Without CC it is unlikely they would have (Lessig probably would not have been in Hong Kong, laihiu probably would not have known who Lessig was to see him speak even if he were in Hong Kong) even though they presumably the share some common interests. An aspect of Creative Commons which is increasingly interesting to me is the way in which relationships are fostered through it and by it. Does anyone have an annecdote similar to this? Has anyone made any lasting relationships through their decision to share using Creative Commons?

The short CC licensed video was directed by renowned filmmaker Jesse Dylan (who did Barack Obama Yes We Can campaign video which won an Emmy). A pile of CC people talk about sharing and the commons, peppered with a bunch of Flickr photos and all set to "17 Ghosts II” and “21 Ghosts III” from Nine Inch Nails' album Ghosts I-IV.

Show your support!  There's a whole bunch of ways to give. Make a donation, it'll get you a place on campaign honour roll and on the new ccNetwork. There's also a range of other goodies that come depending on how much you donate. Or buy something from the CC store.

Tell us all why you CC with a submission to the call for videos. Wear a campaign badge or the donation widget on your website or blog with pride. And most of all, help spread the word!

If you can't make a direct financial contribution, you could always just watch some of the Creative Commons videos. They are all on Revver so each time they are watched they generate ad revenue, some of which goes back to CC.


 3.0 United States licence. Full licence information and attributions for works featured in the film are available on the A Shared Culture page.

The short CC licensed video was directed by renowned filmmaker Jesse Dylan (who did Barack Obama Yes We Can campaign video which won an Emmy). A pile of CC people talk about sharing and the commons, peppered with a bunch of Flickr photos and all set to "17 Ghosts II” and “21 Ghosts III” from Nine Inch Nails' album Ghosts I-IV.

Show your support!  There's a whole bunch of ways to give. Make a donation, it'll get you a place on campaign honour roll and on the new ccNetwork. There's also a range of other goodies that come depending on how much you donate. Or buy something from the CC store.

Tell us all why you CC with a submission to the call for videos. Wear a campaign badge or the donation widget on your website or blog with pride. And most of all, help spread the word!

If you can't make a direct financial contribution, you could always just watch some of the Creative Commons videos. They are all on Revver so each time they are watched they generate ad revenue, some of which goes back to CC.

Image this: it's 10 in the morning and you have a alcoholic ginger beer in one hand, a program that is so jam-packed it reads like a phonebook and a head so full of ideas and information you couldn't possibly remember it all. Welcome to that wondrous, debauturous multi-festival event This Is Not Art!

Consisting of four arts festivals/events, it's arguably australia's biggest and best independent arts festival. If you're into experimental electronic arts Electrofringe is for you. Musos please head to Sound Summit. And get your text on with the National Young Writers' Festival or Critical Animals postgraduate conference. But don't take my word for it, they say "It's the five days of the year where you get to share your ideas, passions and saliva with like-minded crew from all over australia."

So I'm heading down on one of the two flights from Brisbane to Newcastle tomorrow, accompanied by the lovely Amy Barker, Project Manager of Remix My Lit, to talk some talk with some of australia's leading independent artists, performers, musicians, thinkers and ratbags. Here's where I'll be:

Friday 3 October 2008

CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSING (part of Electrofringe)

ABC Pool Producer, John Jacobs takes you though a clear and detailed explanation of Creative Commons licensing from a producers point of view.

Speakers: John Jacobs, Producer, ABC Pool, Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Corporation; and Elliott Bledsoe, Project Officer, Creative Commons Australia
Cost: Free event

LICENCE TO ILL: LEGALITIES, LICENSING, IMPLICATIONS AND IMPLEMENTATIONS! (part of Sound Summit)

Key representatives from APRA, the PPCA and Creative Commons join artists and industry to discuss the latest on artist copyright, licensing, downloading and legislation. In particular, addressing the impact and implications for local music communities.

Facilitators: Ronan Sharkey, Hack/JTV, Triple J, ABC
Speakers: Brett Cottle, CEO, Australasian Performing Right Association; David Vodicka, Principal, Media Arts Lawyers; Elliott Bledsoe, Project Officer, Creative Commons Australia; Lynne Small, Manager of Finance, Operations; Administration, Phonographic Performance Company of Australia
Cost: Free

BEYOND READ/WRITE: A LITERATURE REMIX MASTERCLASS (part of the National Young Writers Festival)

Read/Write has always been a dichotomy in literature. The author on one side, reader on the other, both toiling away in solitude. But is there a more collaborative space for literature? Can work be read & write? Creative Commons Australia invites you to cut, paste, shuffle & republish in this remixable literature masterclass.

Speakers: Amy Barker, Project Manager, Remix My Lit; Elliott Bledsoe, Project Officer, Creative Commons Australia
Cost: Free

Saturday 4 October 2008

YOUR CREATIVITY AND SUCCESS: NEW BUSINESS MODELS UNDER THE MICROSCOPE (part of Sound Summit)

Technology did its part in democratising creativity an eon ago, but where has that led? Experts & artists look at bottom up approaches to making music viable: How is active consumption, participation forcing major industry players out of the picture? Is this DIY or die, version 2.0?

Facilitator: Stuart Buchanen, Mixed Industries
Speakers: Beatrice Jetto, PhD student, Department of Media, Macquarie University; Evan Kaldor, Fbi Radio; Alex Crowfoot, Ollo; and Anna John, Cloth Ear
Cost: Free

If you see me around say hello ^_^

As many people have so adeptly informed me I was indeed on the first episode of the new ABC2 television program The Hack Half Hour. Loosely modeled on Triple J 's Hack radio program (with pictures of course :p), it's a current affairs program which gets a group of young Australians together to talk about different issues. The first episode, on which I was a guest, was called MyFace, and explored the issues of privacy facing social networks, their owners and their users. Check it out below:

Date: Monday, 22 September 2008, 8.30pm, ABC2
Guest: Elliott Bledsoe, Project Officer, Creative Commons Australia and Research Assistant, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation

Will you end up regretting what you reveal about yourself online? We explore why we post so much personal information in blogs, vlogs and on social networking pages and we'll look at what the repercussions and advantages might be for our relationships and career. Will all this information become part of a permanent record? How can it be accessed and used in the future? We hear from Australia's number one YouTube vlogger Natalie Tran (aka community channel), triple j film critic Marc Fennell, a self proclaimed trash-bag from the Gold Coast and even a sneaky hacker and we explore it all through the eyes of 16 year old Sophie.


About Hack Half Hour

The Hack Half Hour is a show that gets everyone talking about the issues that impact on your life. In a comfortable setting like your own local you can be part of the conversation and hear views that explore opinions and experiences you may not have heard or seen before. This is a show about your world and the things around you, so be a part of the conversation!

The Hack Half Hour website will allow you to have your voice. Send us an email, an sms, leave comments on the issues discussed or send us a video. Which ever way you choose - we want to hear from you. Check out our contribute page to see the topics coming up for discussion and have your say.

Each week we'll be posting the latest episode online so if you miss an episode you can always come back and view it on the website, download it to your computer or even take it away on your portable media player.

This is a presentation I gave to Masters students at QUT yesterday.

Date: Wednesday, 17 September 2008
Audience: Masters students at Queensland University of Technology
Presenter: Elliott Bledsoe, Project Officer, Creative Commons Australia and Research Assistant, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation

A presentation by Elliott Bledsoe from Creative Commons Australia detailing 7 case studies of CC use within the Creative Industries. In particular it focuses on new business models emerging which utilise CC for noncommercial licensing while still finding a way to make a buck.



To view Elliott Bledsoe's presenter notes, please download the PowerPoint presentation from Scribd. If you are linking to or referencing this talk, please link to the official page for this lecture on the Creative Commons Australia site.