The Free Music Archive, a long-running Creative Commons music platform, is running its first-ever fundraising drive. It will run from mid-November until mid-December 2015, and is offering donors shirts and stickers at various pledge levels. The Free Music Archive has existed for many years and has provided millions of users with curated, ‘some rights reserved’ audio tracks. Artists are recognizing the value of a progressive approach to distribution and licensing in the digital era, and the Free Music Archive seeks to promote their work with intent to support artists, and those who want to experience the Commons as it continues to grow.

The Free Music Archive began with a generous grant, and has been grant-supported in the past. This fundraising campaign is designed to engage its various communities: users, contributors, curators, artists, media producers, and more. The website has not seen significant changes since its launch, and is in need of upgrades to make it easier to use.

Specifically, FMA plans to make its in-page player more like other ubiquitous audio players, including scrub bars, waveform displays and volume control; to enhance search and allow users to browse by artists and albums, not just tracks; to support a wider variety of audio formats (the site currently only accepts MP3 files); and to release a new version of the FMA API for its dev community.

The money raised in this campaign will be used in hiring the Free Music Archive’s part-time developer on for a full-time year of work, in which time FMA will roll out these improvements. To donate, please visit www.freemusicarchive.org/donate.

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If you needed another reason to show your support for Creative Commons, take The Brin-Wojcicki challenge and help CC claim the full $100k, while showing your support for openness and sharing on the Internet. Go ahead, donate now!

The Brin-Wojcicki Foundation was started by Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google and his spouse, Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of the online genetics firm 23andMe. Anne’s mother Esther Wojcicki is Vice Chair of the Creative Commons Board of Directors and a long-time teacher at Palo Alto High School.

The post Your CC donation will be matched now through Dec 25 appeared first on Creative Commons.

At your right is our t-shirt model, Timothy Vollmer, also CC’s Policy Coordinator. He is sporting the limited edition run of the teal “I Love to Share” t-shirt. Do you have one?

If you do, join our Flickr pool and show us you love to share.

If you don’t, you can give to Creative Commons today, and also show the world you love to share with a donation of $50 or more.

Creative Commons is a global nonprofit organization that enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools, with affiliates all over the world who help ensure our licenses work internationally and raise awareness about our work. Our tools are free and our reach is wide.

Join us in our efforts to help make sharing online easier for everyone. Donate today to claim your awesome t-shirt!

Learn more about why CC runs an annual fundraising campaign.

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Stay up to date with CC news by subscribing to our weblog and following us on Twitter.

Banner "CC Line" by Shinjirou – CC BY.

The post CC News: Our Annual Campaign & CC License Version 4.0 appeared first on Creative Commons.

Dear CC Community,

The world is experiencing an explosion of openness. From artists inviting creative collaboration to governments around the world requiring publicly funded works be available to everyone, the spirit and practice of sharing is gaining momentum and producing results.

By supporting Creative Commons, you are advocating for openness and sharing on the web.

Recent CC accomplishments include:

• Europeana’s new Data Exchange Agreement which releases the metadata for millions of cultural works into the public domain using CC0;
• Flickr reaching the 200 million mark in CC-licensed photos;
• YouTube adding a CC licensing option;
• The US Department of Labor requiring CC BY for a $2 billion grant program;
• Brazil and New Zealand introducing CC licensing for government-funded works;
• CC releasing The Power of Open, a book showcasing phenomenal use cases of CC licensing. Make a donation and receive a hard copy of The Power of Open.

At the CC Global Summit in Warsaw, CC affiliates and supporters shared their plans and discussed the challenges we face in building the tools and support needed for an open future.

Creative Commons relies on donations to build and constantly improve the technical and legal tools that enable openness to flourish. The future for openness is bright. Please join us!

Yours truly,
Cathy Casserly
CEO

p.s. Donate now to receive your limited-edition “I Love to Share” t-shirt!

The post A personal appeal from CC CEO Cathy Casserly appeared first on Creative Commons.

Today marks the official launch of the 2011 Creative Commons Annual Campaign! Please join us in powering the future of openness!

This year, we are offering a limited teal edition of the CC “I love to share” t-shirt to everyone who donates $50 or more (until supplies run out). For those who donate $300 or more, in addition to the t-shirt, we are offering beautiful hard copy editions of The Power of Open, stories of creators sharing knowledge, art, and data using Creative Commons.

The world is experiencing an explosion of openness. From artists inviting creative collaboration to governments around the world requiring publicly funded works be available to everyone, the spirit and practice of sharing is gaining momentum and producing results. We post about these results frequently; subscribe to the CC newsletter for a distilled monthly rundown.

Creative Commons relies on donations to build and constantly improve the technical and legal tools that enable openness to flourish. The future of openness is bright, but ensuring that future requires urgent and sustained effort. CC is continuing to improve the usefulness of our licenses and helping even more artists, institutions and governments share their works. We are reaching a critical mass and need your support now more than ever.

What you can do to help

Help us share the power of open! Spread the word in the following ways:

• Add a widget or button to your blog or website from https://creativecommons.net/spread
• Tell your friends and family about the campaign! Tweet this post. Reblog it under CC BY.
• Add a link to the campaign in your email signature: “Please donate to the CC Annual Campaign, going on now! https://creativecommons.net/donate”
• Retweet us throughout the campaign! http://twitter.com/creativecommons

We’re a nonprofit organization that is very happy to provide our tools and services for free, and we want to remain that way! Learn more: “Why does Creative Commons run an annual fundraising campaign? What is the money used for and where does it go?”

The post You are the Power of Open: 2011 Creative Commons Annual Campaign appeared first on Creative Commons.

Stay up to date with CC news by subscribing to our weblog and following us on Twitter.

A warm thank you to all of our supporters! Our 2010 campaign raised $522,151.25 from 1,139 individual supporters and 22 companies. A huge thanks to our Board of Directors and all of our corporate sponsors, including 3taps, Tucows, Digital Garage, Ebay, Microsoft, LuLu, wikiHow, Hindawi, Squidoo, The Miraverse, and Aramex. More campaign numbers will be available soon on our blog.

Creative Commons enters 2011 with renewed energy, thanks to the holiday season and a new incoming CEO! As many of you know, we welcomed Cathy Casserly as incoming CEO of Creative Commons. As the Senior Partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and former Director of OER at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Cathy brings with her extensive experience with foundations and open educational resources (OER). But Cathy has also been involved with CC from the beginning. Lawrence Lessig writes,

The post CC kicks off its 9th year with incoming CEO Cathy Casserly and a successful year-end campaign appeared first on Creative Commons.

Josh Sommer

Donate

“I’m in a race; a race to outrun a rare and deadly form of bone cancer called chordoma, with an average survival of 7 years. To find a cure, there is a lot that needs to happen sequentially, so to win the race, I need science to move quickly. Fortunately, uncanny new technologies in genomics, computing, synthetic biology, etc. have put cures for virtually any disease within the realm of possibility. Unfortunately, the way we practice science is not designed to move on the timescale of an individual’s disease.

Despite all of the technological advances that have been made in recent years, it still takes on average 1-3 years for results to be transmitted from one lab to the next; it still takes months or years for materials and data to be transferred between institutions; and untold masses of observations and creations never get shared at all. It’s no wonder, then, why it takes decades for discoveries to be translated into new treatments, and why the hurdles are often just too large to overcome for small-market diseases like chordoma.

For anyone affected, or whose loved one is affected, by a life threatening disease, this is simply intolerable. Think about it: in the very recent past, humankind has developed the tools and know-how to cure disease, yet we are stifled from maximizing the potential benefit of these new tools by social and legal systems that evolved in a bygone era. This has to change.

But let’s be realistic. Despite the fact that our scientific enterprise is not optimized for speed, it does have many virtues. And traditions such as academic tenure, peer review, intellectual property, and shareholder return are not going away any time soon – nor should they, necessarily. If we can sequence a genome in the course of a week, surely we can find sensible solutions to enable the data to be shared.

Creative Commons is leading the charge to find these solutions. By helping researchers make data open and available, by streamlining the material transfer process, and by uncovering and integrating data from various stakeholders, Creative Commons is grease to the wheels of science. It is a source of hope to me in the race to outrun my disease. It is a means to maximize our collective investment in research. That’s why I support Creative Commons, and why if there’s a disease you’d like to see cured, I urge you to give whole-heartedly to Creative Commons as well.”

Josh Sommer is the executive director of the Chordoma Foundation, which he co-founded with his mother, Dr. Simone Sommer, after he was diagnosed with a clival chordoma in 2006. He believes that patients should play an active role in bringing about treatments for their own conditions, and that patients represent a largely untapped source of funding, energy, and know-how in the treatment development process. Follow Josh on Twitter.

The post Letter from CC Superhero Josh Sommer of the Chordoma Foundation appeared first on Creative Commons.

Here’s why Tucows supports CC:

“We support Creative Commons because all of our business philosophy is based on the open Internet. For the Internet to really flourish and remain an open, healthy, and great platform for innovation, we need to adapt old sets of rules to new paradigms. Creative Commons is one of the first and best examples of that.” -Elliot Noss, President and CEO

As we approach the end of the year, I invite you to think about how creativity and openness have affected your life. How much would you give to see a future filled with sharing? If you’ve supported CC already this year, would you be willing to give again knowing that your gift will be automatically doubled?

Join Tucows and donate today.

The post Announcing $10k matching giving challenge from Tucows! appeared first on Creative Commons.

Greg Kidd and Karen Gifford by Elizabeth Sabo / CC BY

We’re thrilled to announce that we have successfully met the $3000 matching giving challenge by 3taps, a new startup that makes sifting through classified ads a whole lot easier. We are grateful to 3taps for their support and thankful to everyone who got in on the challenge and doubled the value of their donation to CC. We are in the final weeks of our fundraising campaign, so please continue to pitch in and support the work of CC!

Why 3taps supports CC:

“3taps indexes factual data about items offered for exchange, like price, quantity and item description. Facts like these are important public information that let people find the best deal on the item they want. There has been a lot of confusion about the status of factual data on the Internet, and confusion in this area inhibits innovation. Creative Commons’ newly-released Public Domain Mark is an important tool for bringing clarity to this area. It couldn’t have come at a better time for those interested in collaboration in the sphere of data.” – Karen Gifford, co-founder. More on 3taps.

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