Creative Commons’ goal is a vibrant, usable Commons powered by collaboration and gratitude. That work has taken us beyond the licenses to explore new tools for discovery, reuse and collaboration.

We’re releasing CC Search today and inviting users to try out the beta, including our list-making features, and simple, one-click attribution to make it easier to credit the source of any image you discover.

One of the primary ways that our users find Creative Commons content is through our search page, which provides references to various repositories. The current CC search tool is accessed by nearly 600,000 people every month — but we can do better. There is no “front door” to the commons, and the tools people need to curate, share, and remix works aren’t yet available. We want to make the commons more usable, and this is our next step in that direction.

Our goal is to cover the whole commons, but we wanted to develop something people could test and react to that would be useful at launch. To build our beta, we settled on a goal to represent one percent of the known Commons, or about 10 million works, and we chose a vertical slice of images only, to fully explore a purpose-built interface that represented one type but many providers. For more details on our research and development process, you can read our developer’s notes and reflections over on Medium.

After a detailed review of potential sources, the available APIs, and the quality of their datasets, we selected the Rijksmuseum, Flickr, 500px, the New York Public Library as our initial sources. Later, after discussions with the Metropolitan Museum of Art regarding their collection of public domain works, which were released under CC0 on February 7, 2017, we incorporated their 200,000 CC0 images as well.

The new CC Search harnesses the power of open repositories, allowing users to search across a variety of open content through a single interface. The prototype of this tool focuses on photos as its first media and uses open APIs in order to index the available works. The search filters allow users to search by license type, title, creator, tags, collection, and type of institution.

CC Search Beta also provides social features, allowing users to create and share lists as well as add tags and favorites to the objects in the commons, and save their searches. Finally, it incorporates one-click attribution, giving users pre-formatted copy for easy attribution.

This is not our final product. It’s a beta, developed and released as early as possible in our development process to elicit discussion and conversation about the tool for its continued improvement. We’re in active development, and your comments and feedback will shape our work going forward as we add repositories, new media types, and new features.

This is a significant moment for CC, as we’ve always wanted to be able to do more to help people find and use the commons and make connections with each other as they create new things. We think CC Search is a good first step, and we welcome feedback on the tool via form, social (Twitter, Facebook,) Slack, or email.

The post Announcing the new CC Search, now in Beta appeared first on Creative Commons.

Today, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announces that all public domain images in its collection will be shared under CC0, expanding their digital collection by over 375,000 images as well as providing data on over 420,000 museum objects spanning more than 5,000 years. CC0 allows anyone to use, re-use, and remix a work without restriction. This announcement will shape the future of public domain images online and underscores the Met’s leadership role as one of the most important open museum collections in the world.

Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley joined the Met to announce the release. The Met collection of CC0 images can be browsed on the new CC Search beta, also announced this morning.

“Sharing is fundamental to how we promote discovery, innovation, and collaboration in the digital age,” said Merkley. “Today, The Met has given the world a profound gift in service of its mission: the largest museum in the United States has eliminated the barriers that would otherwise prohibit access to its content, and invited the world to use, remix, and share their public domain collections widely and without restriction.”

Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas P. Campbell concurs: “In making images of our public-domain artworks available to audiences under CC0, the Museum is adapting its practice to make our collection available in a way that best meets the needs of 21st-century, digital audiences. We are excited to share with the public new pathways to creativity, knowledge, and ideas as manifest in the greater utility of its collections spanning 5,000 years of art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art thanks Creative Commons, an international leader in collaboration, sharing, and copyright, for beings our partner in this effort.”

At the announcement, Met partners also shared a series of other open initiatives, including the museum’s first Wikipedian-in-residence, a Github repository of the publicly accessible data, and a partnership with ITHAKA-Artstor and Pinterest to provide more extensive access to its collections. More information on these initiatives can be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Image and Data Resources page.

Our profound thanks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for making this partnership possible. Today’s announcement is the result of the hard work and leadership of the incredible staff team at The Met, and Creative Commons is proud to have supported the development and implementation of this new policy. Through the power of the commons, billions of people will now be able to enjoy the beauty of the Met’s collections as well as participate in the continued growth of the commons, utilizing the infrastructure that makes greater collaboration possible.

Stay tuned to our social media and Slack for more updates and experience the collection yourself at the new CC Search beta.

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Indonesian electronic duo Bottlesmoker has been making DIY, “open source” music since 2005. Founding members Angkuy and Nobie are the brains behind this rebellious, alternative project, blending and bending genre and expectation through their uncompromising approach. Their music is fun, danceable, and truly a product of the internet – a “let’s do it together” collaborative approach to music making that has won them international acclaim.

This year has been particularly successful for the group: in addition to being the first Indonesian group to break through at Singapore’s St. Jerome Laneway festival, they released several new tracks and videos and have been featured in diverse publications including Bandwagon, Vice, and Yes/No music. 

How did you first learn about Creative Commons? What made you want to use CC for your music?

The first time we learned about CC was in 2006, when we released our first album via the Netlabel Neovinyl Records. Baldo, director of Neovinyl, explained how Netlabel worked and suggested we learn about CC. CC makes easier for us to thank the label in our work, and for the label to use and to share. And we think CC is a good way to license our works – which have the principle of free music sharing, so CC is the light for our music to be shared widely and used wisely.

What is “open source music?” Why is open source music important for you?

For us, open source music is a method of music writing that allows people to contribute to creative production and to be free to express their idea in music. Open source music is important in how people collaborate in creative ways to express their ideas and imaginations – through open source there’s a lot of knowledge transformation, the participants will transfer their culture. And that’s important to transfer all the things to the one good thing, which is music. Music in open source music has a million codes of knowledge.

You’ve experienced global success with your unique sound – how does openness play into this? Why is openness an important value for you as musicians?

We’ve learned so many things through the internet from people who share anything important globally. We transfer information and knowledge on internet, we learn from people who open their skill and knowledge, we learn from new culture in internet, the free culture. So, openness is the most important value and we want to be musicians who participate through the sharing of music. So far, we mostly seek unity in our music, so when our music shared freely and widely, and people use and enjoy it, that’s the biggest appreciation for us. We can’t live without openness, so being open to share is really important for our creativity and society, maintains innovation in all parts of creative works, and the openness is the door to that.

On your website, you write that you choose to “live by the internet.” What does that mean for you? What does that mean for fans of your music?

From 2006 until 2008, our life was only on the internet. We were rejected by all sides in Indonesia, from the record label to mass media. They can’t accept the openness of our music, the way we distribute music. But the internet really helped our music to be shared. Through the internet, finally our music can reach any country in this world, can be played by people in any city in the world. Without the internet, our music is only a ghost, frozen in a folder and buried in the computer. For fans, of course, they can access our music with the holy internet, and we can interact and share about cultures, ideas, and knowledge.

What’s next for you? What kinds of projects do you most look forward to? How are you looking to collaborate with other musicians in Indonesia and beyond?

We still make music and share it for free, so we’ll be releasing a new album in April for free. And we look forward to make a project about audio library of Indonesian traditional music instruments that people can access for free. Indonesia has so many musical instruments and we need to archive the sounds for historical education and culture. Soon we will also collaborate with an American musicologist who has been traveled around Indonesia for years doing field recording of traditional music, and we will make something together for our new album.

The post Bottlesmoker: an Indonesian Electronic Duo that lives by the Internet appeared first on Creative Commons.

At the end of 2016, Creative Commons Indonesia held a discussion titled “Celebration of Freedom of Sharing in Indonesia” with support from the Awesome Fund. This event was also held to celebrate Creative Commons’s 15th anniversary.

Creative Commons Indonesia is a project under Wikimedia Indonesia that aims to spread the message about open culture in Indonesia, especially about open licenses like the Creative Commons license. This project started the 11th of November 2011 in Jakarta, and the Indonesian version of Creative Commons license was officially launched in Jakarta on the 11th of November 2012.

CC invited 2 speakers for this discussion. The first speaker was Alifia Qonita Sudharto (Nita), Project Leader for the 2016 Creative Commons Project, and Agung Damarsasongko from the Indonesian Directorate General of Intellectual Property. In this discussion, Nita confirmed that CC Licenses work legally in Indonesia according to article number 80 from Law Number 28 Year 2014 about Copyright Law. Regarding the license recordal mandatory issue in Indonesia, Agung responded that license recordal mandatory appeared in Indonesian Copyright Regulation only aiming at the exclusive type of licenses. CC Licenses, which are categorized as an open license, are mainly used for nonprofit purposes and are not the same with some exclusive licenses which has commercial purposes.

Through this discussion, Nita hoped that the Indonesian people’s knowledge about copyright could be increased, especially about CC License usage. “If someone uses a CC License, you don’t have to be afraid of losing your right when you share your works online. The tool is strong enough to protect the works,” Agung stated. “And for now the government has also been better at tracking down online copyright infringement,” confirmed Agung as a closing statement for this discussion.

Discussion from the CC Indonesia Event

Musical Selections from the Event

Podcast about the CC Indonesia Event

The post Watch/listen: a celebration of Freedom of Sharing in Indonesia! appeared first on Creative Commons.

Our Global Summit is three short months away, and today I am delighted to provide some exciting updates to our program: two keynotes (more to come), five tracks, and a one week extension for submissions (now due on Friday, February 3).

Keynotes

Our first keynote will be international copyright and intellectual property expert Ruth Okediji, William L. Prosser professor of law at the University of Minnesota. Professor Okediji is the author of several books on copyright and intellectual property and is regularly cited for her work on IP in developing countries. She is an editor and reviewer of the Journal of World Intellectual Property, and has chaired the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Committee on Law and Computers, its Committee on Intellectual Property, and its Nominating Committee for Officers and Members of the Executive Committee. In 2011-2012, she was a member of the National Academies Board on Science, Technology and Policy Committee on the Impact of Copyright Policy on Innovation in the Digital Era. In 2016, she received the prestigious McKnight presidential professorship and was a visiting professor at Harvard from 2015-2016. Ruth was also part of the process of negotiating the recently approved Marrakesh treaty; she joined the Nigerian delegation and helped lead the African Group. She has an upcoming book, Copyright Law in an Age of Limitations and Exceptions. Ruth will be speaking to our first summit goal: “To define sharing and the Commons for our generation.”

Our second keynote will be journalist and lawyer Sarah Jeong, a
contributing editor at Vice Motherboard who writes about technology, policy, and law. She is the author of The Internet of Garbage, and has bylines at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Verge, Forbes, the Guardian, and other publications. In 2017, she was named as one of Forbes’s 30 under 30 in the category of Media. Jeong graduated from Harvard Law School in 2014. As a law student, she edited the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, and worked at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. She was a Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale for 2016, and also currently a fellow at the Internet Law & Policy Foundry. Sarah will be speaking to our third summit goal: “To discuss the future of the Creative Commons network and grow the CC movement.”

Tracks and track leads

The CC Global Summit will be organized around five tracks:

1. Policy & advocacy (Copyright reform, advocacy strategies, OER policies, etc)
2. Community & movement (CC network strategy, appreciation culture, stronger ties for the community in different domains, mentoring, strong diversity, etc)
3. Spheres of Open (GLAM, Open Education, OER impact, open data, open design, open hardware, open agriculture/farming, etc)
4. The Future of the Commons (Future of the digital commons, future of digital archives, how does CC fit in the broader Commons movement, Commons and economy, open innovation, Open business models, etc.)
5. Usable Commons (health data, 3D printing, legal infrastructure, open infrastructures for collaboration, patent data, etc)

I would also like to congratulate the track leaders, a diverse group of experts from around the world who will be assisting in programming and curating the tracks.

Track	Track Leader	Contributors
Policy & advocacy	Lisette Kalshoven, Europeana, CC Netherlands	Claudio Ruiz, Timothy Vollmer, Cable Green, Delia Browne
Community & movement	Kelsey Wiens, CC Canada	Claudia Cristiani, Batbold Zagdragchaa, Simeon Oriko, María Juliana Soto, SooHyun Pae
Spheres of open	Scann, CC Argentina	André Rocha, Mahmoud Wardeh, Cable Green, Delia Browne
The Future of the Commons	Alek Tarkowski, CC Poland	Claudia Cristiani, Jane Park, Alexandros Nousias, Paul Stacey
Usable Commons	Jane Park, CC HQ	Ryan Merkley, André Rocha, Alexandros Nousias

If you want to get in touch with any of the track leaders, please email us at summit@creativecommons.org

Call for Submissions extended

Finally, we’re extending the call for submissions to Friday, February 3rd, so that everyone can have an opportunity to submit their proposals. You can find the Call for Submissions here.

As always, we’re available for questions, discussions, or feedback on our Slack, on social media, or at summit@creativecommons.org.

Thank you to everyone who has participated in this process, and we look forward to seeing you all in Toronto in April.

The post Announcing first Keynotes, Tracks, and an Extended Call for Submissions appeared first on Creative Commons.