Virgin Mobile Botches Creative Commons-Driven Ad Campaign
Virgin Mobile in Australia took advantage of the huge repository of photos on Flickr that are licensed for commercial reuse under Creative Commons, incorporating dozens into billboards, newspaper ads and a web site. Unfortunately for the company, the license covers the photographer's copyright but not necessarily the people in the pictures. In many countries, including the U.S. and Australia, you can't use someone's photo commercially without their permission. Shelley Powers puts the blame for this squarely on ... read more
Free the Presidential Debates
Barack Obama and John Edwards have both written letters this week calling on presidential debates to be released under a Creative Commons license. Edwards' take: The Creative Commons license terms offer an easy way to ensure that the networks' rights are protected. Much of the content on my own campaign web site is available under just such a license. Commercial constraints are severe enough in their effect in diluting the substance of our campaigns. Limiting access to long-form televised debates makes matters ... read more
Fundraiser: Creative Commons for Christy Corum
I'm organizing an online fundraiser for Christy Corum, a Jacksonville girl who broke her neck in a 2002 jet-skiing accident and was paralyzed from the neck down. Pictured here with her niece, Christy turned 17 in October and needs an exercise bike, laptop and a wheelchair that can lift her to a standing position, according to her parents. With a fund-raising goal of $5,000, we're going to produce a Creative Commons Calendar, a 12-month wall calendar that features 12 photos contributed to the Creative Commons. The ... read more
RSS Graphic Under Creative Commons License
In March, when I wanted to illustrate why web publishers should support the common feed icon, I put together a graphic showing the ways RSS and Atom feeds have been identified on the web. I just received another media request to use this graphic in a publication, so I'm releasing it under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license. For publications that can't use a Creative Commons license, send requests in email. ... read more
Niall Kennedy Gets Microsoft's Goat
When former Windows Live RSS developer Niall Kennedy saw that one of his Flickr photos was displayed in a Microsoft Team RSS blog post without the required attribution, he swapped it out with one of the web's most infamous pornographic photos, incorporating the Creative Commons logo to preserve what's left of the subject's dignity. I'm not going to show the soul-scarring original photo, because people would have to bleach their web browsers and RSS aggregators, but Matt Haughey's spoof MasterCard logo should make ... read more
Feed Autodiscovery Wiki Launched
Robert Sayre has created a Feed Autodiscovery reference that's growing more useful by the minute. He took the original document created by the RSS Advisory Board, placed it on a brand-new wiki, and is encouraging submissions from the public to cover autodiscovery for all syndication formats. One way people can help is to add software they use to the supporting products section if it supports feed autodiscovery. I like seeing a Creative Commons-licensed document I worked on put to use elsewhere, though over time ... read more
Creative Commons and the Eldred Decision
Lawrence Lessig quantifies how well Creative Commons is doing: Creative Commons launched the licensing project in December 2002. Within a year, there were more than 1,000,000 link-backs to our licenses (meaning at least a million places on the web where people were linking to our licenses, and presumptively licensing content under those licenses). Within two years, that number was 12,000,000. At the end of our last fundraising campaign, it had grown to about 45,000,000 link-backs to our licenses. That was ... read more
