Brian Lamb: “I think Creative Commons is a cultural agreement”

Brian Lamb at the festival ZEMOS98 (Sevilla, Spain)

Brian Lamb at the festival ZEMOS98. Photo by Julio Albarrán (CC BY-NC-SA) (Sevilla, Spain)

In the small community of Kamloops, in the interior of British Columbia, Brian Lamb is the Director of Innovation at Thompson Rivers University Open Learning and gives interesting opinions about Creative Commons and intellectual property.

This interview was previously featured in the post Canadians using CC licenses. Lamb is one of the members of the Creative Commons Canada Advisory Board and founded some the earliest campus services for blogs and wikis in Canada. His weblog, abject.ca, is highly recommendable.

 – How did you start using Creative Commons?

I worked in education technology medium for a long time and, early on, I got really frustrated with traditional education technology that tends to be so controlled – “This is your classroom, this is activity 1, this is activity 2” – because on my spare time I was using a weblog, wikis… and I thought “This is way easier, way cheaper, more fun” Continue reading →

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Open Movie Project: “Tears of Steel”

Official poster for Blender Foundation's "Tears of Steel" (CC-BY)

Official poster for Blender Foundation’s “Tears of Steel” (CC-BY)

The visual effects of “Tears of Steel” have nothing to envy big sci-fi film productions from major cinema companies that collapse theatres worldwide. However, this shortfilm was not produced in Hollywood but in the Netherlands, was developed through open software and has not follow an usual circuti of distribution for this kind of productions, instead, can be found entirely online and purchased on a DVD with extra content.

This 12-minutes shortfilm, online released on September 2012, is the fourth open movie production by Dutch studio for open 3D projects Blender Institute. An independent production financed by its online community through crowdfunding and the support of the Netherlands Film Fund, Ginegrid consortium corporate sponsors such as Google.

The project was an incentive to develop a free and open source pipeline for visual effects in film industry, which uses the creation software Blender 3D, developed by this institute. Following the philosophy of a true open movie, the final production and all the material developed on the filmmaking process is released under Creative Commons licences, so other filmmakers can study and reproduce the details of the creation process. Continue reading →

Ian MacKenzie: “I think CC arose as a response to the desire of remix”

Filmmaker & Crowdfunding writer, Ian MacKenzie, Twitter profile picture (@ianmack)

Ian MacKenzie, filmmaker and crowdfunding writer (@ianmack)

Another interview from Canadians using CC licenses: Ian MacKenzie was one of the panelists at the Creative Commons Canada Salon in Vancouver, October 15. He is not only a filmmaker, now known specially for the documentary about Occupy Wall Street movement, “Occupy Love”, but also an advocate for crowdfunding as a new, innovative and alternative way to fund his productions. We talked by Skype about this and more:

– When did you first hear about Creative Commons?

I started knowing about Creative Commons because I was using Flickr and I saw they featured options for Creative Commons. From there I started looking through it and researching on it and the philosophy behind Creative Commons.  Continue reading →

#FREEBASSEL

UPDATE from August 1st, 2017: Horrific: Reports that Bassel Khartabil Has Been Executed in Syria

Bassel Safadi, photo by Joi Ito (CC BY).

Bassel Safadi was at the CC Asia Conference 2010 in Seoul (South Korea). Photo by Joi Ito (CC BY).

After more than a year, no one has received yet any official explanation or reasons to the detention of Bassel Khartabil, a Palestinian-Syrian well-respected computer engineer, 31 year old, specialized in open source software development who volunteered on Internet projects like Creative Commons, Mozilla Firefox, Wikipedia or Open Clip Art Library.

Khartabil, who is better known online and in technology communities as Bassel Safadi was detained on March 15, 2012, in a wave of arrests in the Mazzeh, district of Damascus (Syria), no trial.

Friends and family started on July 2012 the campaing #FREEBASSEL to to raise global awareness about Bassel’s situation and fight to see him free.  Continue reading →

Mary Burgess: “There is still some concern about intellectual property for faculty and how all would work”

Mary Burgess

Mary Burgess (BCcampus)

Second full interview from Canadians using CC licenses: The re-launched Creative Commons Canada has BCcampus as the main institution representing Creative Commons in the British Columbia area. In a conversation by Skype with Mary Burgess, the Director of Curriculum Services and Applied Research, introduces to the organization and its involvement on the Creative Commons mission and her particular involvement in open education.

 – What is BCcampus and when did you started working in this organization?

BCcampus is a group that is funded by the BC’s Ministry of Advanced Education, to provide collaborative services and resourcing, an advocacy for education technology, online learning and open education initiatives. This is where the Creative Commons comes in, for us.  Continue reading →

#MP3Tribute: 100 CC-licensed albums

Words and projects remembering Aaron Swartz‘s legacy are all over the Internet. In his memory, the DJ, hacker and electronic musician Jairus Khan started the #MP3Tribute, where he wants to collect over a 100 CC-licensed music albums to release on Swartz’s memory, for his involvement in the first steps of Creative Commons licences.

List of songs currently available at the #MP3Tribute for you to listen &/or download

List of songs currently available at the #MP3Tribute for you to listen and/or download under BY-NC-ND licence.

The idea is simple: Khan is asking artists to contribute with their work, which should be “commercially available at some point” but NOT already released under Creative Commons or any other similar open licence.

By contributing, artists would make those albums, that previously were illegal to copy, available to audiences worldwide under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivates (BY-NC-ND) licence.

So far, Khan collected over 15 different styles albums: from the dark music from Crack Nation to the hip-hop of Jesse Dangerously or the folk by H.U.M.A.N.W.I.N.E., and many other sounds in between.

Continue reading →

Kent Mewhort: “CC was looking for an institutional presence in Canada”

Kent Mewhort at CC Global Summit 2011. Photo by David Kindler (CC BY)

Kent Mewhort at CC Global Summit 2011. Photo by David Kindler (CC BY)

Many interesting points of views about Creative Commons and intellectual property did not appear in Canadians using CC licenses so, in the next weeks, the full interviews will be posted in individual posts under a new category.

 Full interviews start with a conversation on Skype with Kent Mewhort, an independent Ontario lawyer and legal project lead for Creative Commons Canada, former staff lawyer at Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), a non-profit legal clinic at the University of Ottawa. The interview starts discovering his professional background and initial involvement with CC licences and continuos explores the early history of Creative Commons.

– How did you get involved with Creative Commons? 

I come from software engineering background; I’ve being always interested in software licensing and is from it that I first got interested in Creative Commons. Continue reading →

The 2nd Open Education Week begins!

Open Education Week. March 11-15, 2013. Photo from openeducationweek.org

Open Education Week takes place on March 11-15, 2013. openeducationweek.org

Get your calendar or daily agenda close to you before keep reading this: in its second annual edition, the Open Education Week starts next Monday, March 11st, till Friday 15ht. As both, an online and offline event and seminars online (webinars) are organized worldwide for roundtable discussions, training sessions and lectures about research and other initiatives.

What is Open Education? Educational networks, open teaching and learning materials, open textbooks, open data, open scholarship, other open-source educational tools… All these is Open Education. Summarizing, it is a set of practices that promote the access to education anywhere, any time, through Open Educational Resources (OER) that allow learners to share, use and reuse knowledge.

Under this concept of education, Creative Commons licences play a main role on keeping authors’ work recognized while making their work more accessible and reusable. This is why main CC staff and many affiliate teams are getting so involved in the Open Education Week, with seminars about the version 4.0 of the CC licences or the Open Policy Network, among others. Continue reading →

Canadians using CC licences

Creative Commons Canada profile picture on Twitter. Follow them at @CC_Canada

Creative Commons Canada profile picture on Twitter (@CC_Canada)

For a wide country like Canada, a larger team of Creative Commons supporters is needed in order to build a strong affiliate team that promotes Creative Commons licences and activities as well as free culture and open resources across the country. 

This is a brief overview of different profiles working with or for Creative Commons in the Canadian territory: how they started using CC licences, how this are promoted across the country, their thoughts about plagiarism, copyright VS. copyleft, free culture…

In March 2012, Creative Commons Canada was re-launched in a more institutional way, to give an infrastructure to the team and its activities. Previously, supporters at Creative Commons Canada were just individual volunteers. Continue reading →

“¡Qué bueno que viniste!” Argentina will host upcoming CC Global Summit 2013

General San Martín sculpture at Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires (Argentina). Photo by Guillermo Esteves (BY-NC-SA)

General San Martín sculpture at Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires (Argentina). Photo by Guillermo Esteves (BY-NC-SA)

A new event related with Creative Commons was announced on the last day of February: in 2013, the biannual summit of Creative Commons lovers worldwide will be hosted in Buenos Aires (Argentina) by the end of August, from the 21st to the 24th.

The hosts Who will say to attendants “¡Qué bueno que viniste!” (Glad you came!, a common Argentinian expression) will be the two organizations from Argentinian Creative Commons affiliate team.

Since March 2012, Fundación Vía Libre and Wikimedia Argentina are supporting Creative Commons licenses and advocating for free culture or copyleft and providing a “necessary debate on Intellectual Property Law in Argentina, offering legal alternatives which are viable, sustainable and which propose a model of creation and circulation of culture based on diversity”. Continue reading →