Today the Ford Foundation announced an open licensing policy for all of their grant-funded projects and research. The new arrangement came into effect February 1, 2015 and covers most grant-funded work, as well as the outputs of consultants. The Ford Foundation has chosen to adopt the CC BY 4.0 license as the default for these materials. Grant agreements will now include a paragraph requiring the grant recipient to broadly share all copyrightable products (such as research reports, photographs, videos, etc.) funded by the grant under CC BY. And the Ford Foundation is leading by example by adopting CC BY for all materials not subject to third-party ownership on their own website.

Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, said, “This policy change will help grantees and the public more easily connect with us and build upon our work, ensure our grant dollars go further and are more impactful, and – most importantly – increase our ability to advance social justice worldwide.”

“We’re incredibly pleased to see the Ford Foundation adopting a Creative Commons licensing policy for a wide range of grant-funded works, promoting openness and re-use of content produced through its philanthropic grantmaking,” said Ryan Merkley, CEO of Creative Commons. “The Ford Foundation joins a growing movement of foundations and governments adopting policies that increase access to and re-use of digital education materials, research articles, and data using Creative Commons.”

The Ford Foundation is an independent, nonprofit grant-making organization created in 1936. Its mission is “to strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement.” In 2013 the Ford Foundation granted almost $570,000,000 to projects and organizations around the world.

The Ford Foundation joins several other philanthropic grantmaking organizations who have adopted Creative Commons licensing policies for the outputs of their charitable giving. We’ve highlighted several over the last few months, including the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (who also now require CC BY for all their project-based grantmaking) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (who adopted a CC BY open access policy for published grant-funded research and data). Releasing grant-funded content under permissive open licenses like CC BY means that these materials can be more easily shared and re-used by the public. And they can be combined with other resources that are also published under an open license.

Congratulations to the Ford Foundation on adopting an open licensing policy that will encourage the sharing of rich content and data in the digital global commons. Creative Commons continues to urge other foundations and funding bodies to emulate the ongoing leadership of the Ford Foundation by making open licensing an essential component of their grantmaking strategy.

Together with the Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons has officially proposed the GNU General Public License version 3 as a candidate for compatibility with CC BY-SA version 4.0. The announcement was made on the CC license development mailing list on January 29th, kicking off what will be at least a month-long discussion period before a final compatibility determination is made.

This proposal is significant because it would bridge a gap between two of the most widely-used copyleft licenses for code and content. Currently, developers are sometimes reluctant to integrate BY-SA content into GPL projects because of uncertainty about how the two licenses work together. Eliminating obstacles to remix between licenses so similar in aim and spirit is precisely what the compatibility mechanism in BY-SA was designed to do.

However, there are differences between the two licenses that pose issues for the CC and FSF communities to consider before declaring compatibility. Over the next several weeks, we will be leading a public discussion about those topics, ensuring the final decision will be informed by community input. We encourage anyone interested to join the discussion by signing up here.

GPLv3 is the second candidate for ShareAlike compatibility considered by Creative Commons. The Free Art License version 1.3 was considered under CC’s established compatibility process and criteria and was declared compatible in October 2014.

Join us in San Francisco at Park Life Gallery on 13 February 2015 for a Creative Commons DIY Salon. This salon features local artists who celebrate inexperience, sharing culture, and self-taught expertise in projects ranging from publishing and printmaking, to web-based collaborative music communities, to building open source libraries and visualizations.

This event also celebrates the San Francisco launch of I Can Do Anything Badly 2: Learning By Doing is a Shared Responsibility, a Creative Commons licensed artist’s book by Hoël Duret & The Big Conversation Space, designed by Frédéric Teschner, which features conversational interviews in English and French about DIY culture – from computer programming and independent publishing, to Wikipedia and furniture design.

Talks will be interspersed with ambient music performances from musicians from the Disquiet Junto.

Event Details:

Friday February 13th
5:00 – 8:00 PM
Park Life Gallery
3049 22nd Street
San Francisco, CA

Facebook event page.

On January 26th, 2015, the Free Music Archive put out a call for entries for their ‘microSong Challenge.’ The first of three consecutive contests the Free Music Archive will run through spring of 2015, the microSong Challenge requires participants to pack a whole song into 15 seconds or less – the maximum length for most video-sharing app platforms (some are even shorter).

The Free Music Archive is a repository for curated tracks (currently almost 80,000) that are licensed under Creative Commons, Public Domain and FMA-only licenses that allow for the tracks to be streamed, downloaded and shared for free. Some content may be used in videos or remixes, depending on how it’s licensed.

From January 26th until February 20th, 2015, any registered FMA user can submit their miniscule composition(s) to the Free Music Archive. It’s free to sign up for an FMA account, and anyone 13 or older can enter the running. There will be a link to the contest on the homepage.

After the last day of the contest, a panel of judges will determine the top three! Our judges include composer Chris Zabriskie, Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley, and WFMU DJ Jim Price. They will judge entries based on originality, creativity, artistic merit, adherence to the time limit, and general musical appeal. The first prize winner
will receive a 3-D printer and runners-up will get prizes from Creative Commons and the Free Music Archive’s BFF radio station, WFMU.

Each microSong must be submitted in MP3 format. Every microSong will be licensed under a Creative Commons Zero license so that it can be freely used by anyone in a video, remix, extraordinarily brief performance art piece, miniature karaoke competition, or anything else they can come up with.

For more information about the microSong Challenge, email contact@freemusicarchive.org or visit www.freemusicarchive.org

Congratulations to the CC Finland team for the Finnish translation of CC0!

If it seems like you just saw them featured here, you’re not mistaken; they published the first official translation of the 4.0 suite just a few months ago, and now they are the first to have the complete set of CC legal tools available in their language.

Our thanks and congratulations again to the team of Maria Rehbinder of Aalto University, legal counsel and license translation coordinator of CC Finland; Martin von Willebrand, Attorney-at-Law and Partner, HH Partners, Attorneys-at-law Ltd: for translation supervision; Tarmo Toikkanen, Aalto University, general coordinator of CC Finland; Henri Tanskanen, Associate, HH Partners, Attorneys-at-law Ltd: main translator, and Liisa Laakso-Tammisto, translator, with thanks to Aalto University, HH Partners, and the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture for their support.

Update: CC Finland’s announcement (in Finnish).