Today we’re launching CC’s first-ever Kickstarter campaign. We’re raising money to write a book about open business models that incorporate CC licensing. We hope you’ll join our Kickstarter campaign and help us empower creators around the globe to pursue businesses built on open content.

This is an ambitious project. Over the course of the year, our plan is to find answers to the question we are so often asked — how can creators make money to sustain what they do when they are letting the world reuse their work for free?

To do this, we will find and profile 24 businesses, creators, and organizations that are successfully using Creative Commons. We will tell their success stories, but we also want to go a step further to reveal strategies that other creators can use for their own endeavors. Ultimately, we will put our findings together in an ebook, and we will publish an interactive tool that people can use to develop and evaluate their own open business models.

Along the way, we’re going to conduct an experiment in working in the open. We’ll be publishing regularly on one of our favorite storytelling platforms – Medium (who also happens to use CC licenses, and is one of the businesses we will profile in the book). We’re thinking of our Medium publication, Made with Creative Commons, as a digital whiteboard. There, we’ll share insights as we go, try out new ideas, and we’ll openly discuss obstacles we face, questions we have, and issues we are mulling. Our hope is that the process of researching, analyzing, and writing the book will be truly collaborative and open.

In fact, this Kickstarter campaign is itself a case study of an open business model. Crowdfunding has become a tried-and-true method to fund creative works in the digital age. In many ways, it’s an ideal open business model because it requires creators to think about building community from the start, rather than letting it be an after-thought. We see this Kickstarter as a great chance to get people interested and involved in our work.

We have set a realistic but ambitious goal to fund the whole project, but like all Kickstarters, if we don’t hit the target, we don’t get any of the funds. It’s all or nothing, so we need your help.

Momentum really matters with crowdfunding. Help us start strong by supporting the CC Kickstarter now and by spreading the word among your networks. Help us show the world how Creative Commons can be good for business — and maybe even start one of your own.

Today CC is proud to launch two new translations of the latest version of the CC licences: Japanese and te reo Māori. These are particularly significant, as they are the first official translations of 4.0 into Asia-Pacific languages. Perhaps even more exciting, te reo Māori, the language of the Indigenous people of New Zealand, is the first indigenous language into which the CC licences have been translated.

Translation is an essential part of our licensing process — our licenses aren’t finished until everyone who wants to share and reuse CC-licensed works has the ability to understand the license in the language they know best. That means all populations, large, medium, and small. These two translations provide great examples of how our affiliates are achieving that goal – the ambitious and eager te reo Māori team, and the Japanese team.

The te reo Māori translation was completed by Ian Cormack, Director of Taumatua Māori Language Services and a licensed Māori Translator, and provided a number of interesting challenges – such as how to translate ‘Sui Generis Database Rights’ (eventually translated as Motika Pātengi Raraunga Momo Takitahi). Karaitiana Taiuru, prominent indigenous philosopher and governance practitioner and a leading figure in the online Māori renaissance of the internet, feels that the translation “is an important step for te reo Māori resources being able to utilise the power and flexibility of Creative Commons…The translated licences will promote taonga and matauranga to be created, shared and published with the legal protection of the Creative Commons licences while recognising iwi, hapū and whānau, as well as whakapapa of the material.”

The Japanese translation will also help significantly with the adoption of CC in that country. Japan still sees ongoing discussion on open data licensing, both at national and local levels, and this Japanese translation will add important choice for those interested in this issue. The process was started on Feb. 2014 and led by Tasuku Mizuno. Other contributors include Mitsuru Maekawa, Maki Higashikubo, Yuuri Nakao, who developed initial draft, as well as Naoki Kanehisa, Yuko Noguchi and Tomoaki Watanabe who joined the review process. Big thanks go to Der Spiegel im Spiegel, Butameron, Mr. Kawanishi, and others who publicly or directly provided CC Japan team valuable inputs.

We are looking forward to seeing what new uses of the licences come from these translations. We also have some more great translations coming up, so watch out for more info.

Hubble Space Telescope and Earth Limb / NASA on The Commons / No known copyright restrictions

If you could send a folder with 50 MB of content to every human on Earth, what would you include? This weekend Creative Commons volunteers and Outernet are hosting a CC Content Edit-a-thon to populate the first Outernet library to be broadcast from space. The edit-a-thon will take place at Mozilla Festival East Africa (MozFestEA) in a weekend-long track that will be kicked off Saturday morning by Outernet and CC volunteers from Uganda and Kenya. During the first hour, Outernet will introduce the initiative and set guidelines, and CC volunteers will provide basic knowledge and training about how and where to find open content. This first hour will be recorded and posted to the Outernet wiki and Outernet’s YouTube channel so that anyone in the world may participate.

Remote participation from anywhere in the world is encouraged! Here’s how you, your friends and colleagues can participate:

• Tell people about it! Send them to this blog post, or this one by Outernet, or http://editathon.outernet.is and tweet using #LibraryFromSpace.
• Re-post this on your own blog – this blog post is public domain (CC0).
• Register (free) to help Outernet anticipate the number of participants.
• Come to a physical edit-a-thon. In addition to the MozFestEA session in Kampala, Uganda, CC volunteers in Guatemala will host their own satellite edit-a-thon to start building a CC library in Spanish for Latin America. CC volunteers in Nigeria will participate remotely as well.
• On 18-19 July, head over to the Outernet wiki: https://wiki.outernet.is/wiki/Outernet_Wiki. Video, guidelines, directions, and the links to where you’ll be curating, creating, and editing open content will all be here. There will also be an open chatroom to communicate directly with MozFestEA participants and CC volunteers in Guatemala, Nigeria, and anywhere.

We hope to find and curate the best content for each country that is openly licensed or in the public domain. All new content created as part of this event will be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

In addition, Outernet is working on its CC platform integration to provide options for individuals who want to release their content into the public domain (via CC0) or under CC licenses.

Outernet and CC volunteers are building a library that everyone can enjoy, even without an Internet connection. Be one of the first to put content on its shelves!

More about Outernet

Outernet is Humanity’s Public Library, a free data signal broadcast from space that eludes censorship and is publicly editable. To receive the Outernet signal, a user can build their own receiver or purchase one from Outernet. Once an Outernet receiver is active, a user can browse the content they have received using any Wi-Fi enabled device.

More about MozFestEA

MozFestEA brings together different groups of people to build open innovative solutions and to brainstorm ideas and solutions to the current challenges in East Africa with the help of the web as a platform and web literacy. This years MozFestEA will take place at Victoria University in Kampala, Uganda on 17-19, July 2015.

The 2015 Creative Commons Global Summit is taking place in Seoul, South Korea 14-17 October 2015. CC hosts this gathering every two years, bringing together our affiliate network along with partners, activists, and collaborators in the open movement to celebrate and advance the Commons. The last CC Summit took place in Buenos Aires in 2013.

You can submit proposals for talks, workshops, hackathons, panels, presentations, performances, showcases and other activities are welcome. The deadline for proposals is Friday, 17 July.

 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an absolutely essential organization that defends civil liberties on the Internet. It fights for users by promoting free speech and access to technology, championing privacy, and advocating for progressive solutions to intellectual property challenges in the digital age. EFF tackles these issues with some of the smartest and most committed lawyers, technology experts, and activists on the planet.

EFF is celebrating its 25th anniversary this month.

The work of EFF and Creative Commons overlaps on a variety of issues, including promoting the use of open licenses for publicly funded research and educational materials, protecting the public domain, and ensuring limitations and exceptions to copyright in support of users and the public interest.

For those of you around the San Francisco bay area, check out the EFF anniversary party on July 16. And even if you can’t make it there, consider becoming a member and supporting EFF with a financial contribution. Congratulations to EFF and the incredible accomplishments they’ve achieved over the last 25 years. Here’s to another quarter century!