Welcome to the very first day of Creative Commons’ 10th birthday celebrations!

Over the next 10 days we will be celebrating CC’s first decade with activities, events, tweets and competitions. As well as dozens of real world parties, we’ve set up a dedicated CC10 website as a hub for all things birthday. Each day on this site we will be showcasing highlights from the CC community – some of our favorite users, platforms and resources. Like an advent calendar, these featured items will be ‘revealed’ as each day of the CC10 website goes live, along with the events for that day and following days, and other exciting announcements and materials. You’ll be able to navigate backwards to previous days using the dates at the top of the page.

We kick off our CC showcase today looking at the world of CC and text, with a blog post from one of CC’s longest running and most vocal supporters – Cory Doctorow. Cory introduces us to one of his favorite CC-licensed works, Rudy Rucker’s Wetware books, which he calls “the finest high-weirdness of the golden age of cyberpunk.” We also bring you an interview with Taylor Pipes of Scribd, a digital document sharing platform with more than 25 million texts, an amazing 80% of which are CC-licensed. And finally, we give you all (or at least those of you who speak Swedish) a primer on the CC licenses, what they mean and which is best for you, with CC Sweden‘s Välj rätt licens! poster.

As you know, any second now we’ll be officially launching CC’s 10th birthday celebrations. But the party has already started for our global community.

Over the course of the 10 days of CC10, more than 25 events celebrating CC’s first decade will be held around the world, on every continent except Antarctica (we’re working on that one). These global events are arguably the most important part of our CC10 celebrations, as they are hosted by and bring together our community, the people who make CC happen. Most are being run by our local affiliate teams, although a few are run by other friends of CC, like the Dunedin Linux Users Group or the Auraria Library in Denver. They include all kinds of events in all kinds of places – from a teachers’ breakfast in Stockholm to a Conference and Cocktails in Nairobi. CC HQ is having it’s own party on 8 December here in San Francisco, with speakers, DJs and fun activities – but we are completely overshadowed by the dozens of parties happening in the rest of the world.

We think the first party (there are so many it’s hard to keep track) was a film screening in Aalborg on 13 November hosted by CC Denmark and KinoPlatform. Between then and now we’ve had parties in Costa Rica (you can see photos of it already up in our CC10 Flickr group). Between then and now we’ve had New Zealand, Venezuela and, just last night, South Africa – and there are many more in the coming week. The final event that we know of during the CC10 week will be a party at the Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest in Rio de Janeiro, on 15 December (beating Korea, Oman and Paris by its timezone). But even that will be trumped by CC Japan’s Anniversary Party in Tokyo on December 22.

So hop over to our CC10 wiki page to see if there’s a party near you.

For all those hosting a CC10 event around the world, CC’s CEO Cathy Casserly has this message.

Want to hold your own CC10 party? There’s nothing to it. Just get a few friends together and listen to some CC music, watch some CC films, or read some CC books – or better yet, share, remix and recreate them. Then add your party to our events wiki, putting “CC10″ in the event type, and it will automatically be copied to our CC10 website and spread throughout our network. And for good measure, let us know by emailing press@creativecommons.org. You can download all the CC10 logos and everything else you might need for promotion from our wiki.

Correction: CC Denmark was incorrectly marked as being 13 November – it is 13 December.

In celebration of Creative Commons’ tenth anniversary, we’re writing about various platforms that host CC-licensed content. Today, we’re featuring document-sharing site Scribd.

Most people reading this are probably quite familiar with Scribd. It’s an easy, reliable place to publish documents and presentations. A lot of professional publishers use it, including our friends at Pratham Books. One thing that’s neat about Scribd is its embed feature: you can insert documents into a website, just like YouTube videos or Flickr photos.

I asked Scribd content and community manager Taylor Pipes to recommend a few of his favorite CC-licensed works on Scribd, and I also asked him a few questions.

Street Photography an eBook by Alex Coghe

How much of the content on Scribd is CC-licensed? Has that number stayed constant or changed since you implemented CC licensing?

Most of the content published on Scribd is CC-licensed, as we encourage authors to use CC licenses when possible. We’ve seen the number of CC-licensed works on Scribd grow by over 100% year over year. While our library encompasses over 25 million documents, 20 million of them have been uploaded utilizing the Creative Commons license.

Have there been any unexpected results to CC licensing on Scribd? People reusing each other’s documents in surprising or unusual ways?

Probably the most powerful result of CC licensing has been the proliferation of embedded Scribd documents around the web. We have more than 10 million Scribd document embeds now, and many of those are from bloggers or other independent writers. Because of Creative Commons licenses, these bloggers are able to integrate the content of these works on Scribd into their own writing.

Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig

Since Scribd launched, have your community’s attitudes toward sharing changed?

We’ve definitely seen an increase in user understanding and awareness of the sharing now possible with social media. Authors have realized that allowing users to remix and re-publish their content is a great way to help their content go viral and get distribution around the web. We are in an entirely different place with publishing, which is truly astonishing. The amount of change and disruption that has occurred in the last few years is a testament to the radical innovation stemming from mobile. We feel quite strongly that our work, especially with CC-documents and publications, is helping to write a new chapter in publishing.

Taylor’s favorite CC-licensed works on Scribd

• Journalist Field Guide to Mobile Reporting
• Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig
• Simple Nature by Benjamin Crowell
• Street Photography by Alex Coghe

In celebration of Creative Commons’ tenth anniversary, we asked various friends of CC to write about their favorite CC-licensed content. Today, blogger and science fiction author Cory Doctorow writes about the CC-licensed novels of one of the original cyberpunks.

Rudy Rucker’s Wetware books: the finest high-weirdness of the
golden age of cyberpunk

Rudy Rucker is one of the modern heroes of science fiction, one of the original cyberpunks. The early cyberpunks only had a few writers who could be meaningfully called punks — writers like John Shirley and Richard Kadrey — but there was only one who could truly be called cyber: Rudy Rucker. Rucker is a mad professor, a mathematician and computer scientist with a serious, scholarly interest in the limits of computation and the physics and mathematics of higher-dimension geometry.

But that’s just about the only thing you can describe as “serious” when it comes to Rucker. He’s a gonzo wildman, someone for whom “trippy” barely scratches the surface. His work is shot through with weird sex, weird drugs, weird brain chemistry, and above all, weird science.

The Ware Tetralogy is comprised of four novels written between 1982 and 2000, and I gobbled them up as they came out. They describe a future dominated by intensely weird and eerily scientifically plausible self-modifying cluster organisms that use evolutionary algorithms to bud offspring, rising to contend with humanity for dominance of the Earth and its envrions. They also get very, very high. On math. And they screw. A lot. Not like weasels. Not, in fact, like anything. Because Rudy Rucker is NOT LIKE ANYTHING.

Rucker is a tremendously prolific writer and editor who is publishing some of his finest work today (I’ve got his latest, the independently published Turing and Burroughs sitting at the top of my to-be-read pile as I write this). But the Ware books remain at the core of what I think of as the fiction that shaped who I am as a writer and thinker. And they’re available as a free, CC-licensed download (PDF).

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Creative Commons 3.0 Uganda licenses. Since joining the Creative Commons family in March of 2011, the Ugandan team has been incredibly busy: hosting the African Regional Meeting, pulling together petitions for the Pan-African Intellectual Property Organization, and spreading the news about CC licenses. While doing all these great activities, they’ve also completed one of the last 3.0 ports.

The licenses are available through the license chooser, and like all of our licenses, are intended for use anywhere in the world. The Uganda 3.0 licenses are important as the first 3.0 licenses in Africa and one of the last 3.0 ports before the launch of the new 4.0 licenses.

Creative Commons would like to extend a huge thanks to the whole CC Uganda team; The National Book Trust of Uganda (NABOTU); the Centre for Health, Human Rights and Development (CEHURD); and especially to Primah Kwagala for leading the porting team.