Another Nine Inch Nails album out under a Creative Commons license

Eric Steuer, May 5th, 2008

More very exciting news from Nine Inch Nails: Just two months after the Creative Commons-licensed release of NIN’s Ghosts I-IV, the band has released another album, entitled The Slip, also under CC terms. NIN has this to say about The Slip, which, like its predecessor, is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.

we encourage you to
remix it
share it with your friends,
post it on your blog,
play it on your podcast,
give it to strangers,
etc.

We’ll have more to say about this great news soon.

Each of us in our humble way…

Mike Linksvayer, May 4th, 2008

Ambient sound artist Gurdonark writes beautifully at the (unofficial) ccMixterblog on Virtuosos, Rock Stars and Remix Culture:

We all tend to make remixes more than we tend to discuss high-flown concepts–but my simple premise is that we should never forget that we are part of a conversation about permissive licensing and its virtue in advancing the cause of music. Only one person can be a Liszt or a Rachmaninoff. But each of us in our humble way can work, through voluntary licensing, to create a “creator-safe” zone for using samples and ‘pellas to share culture. Our modes may be hip-hop or electronica or rock (or ambient), but the point is the same–we advance a sharing economy, and the creative weight of history is with us, not against us.

Read the whole post … and listen to one of his tracks (Black-eyed Susan from Eerie Exchange Prairie Park licensed under CC BY).

National Cancer Institute to use Tranche Network to share data

Kaitlin Thaney, May 2nd, 2008

From the Science Commons blog …

“The National Cancer Institute will soon be using Tranche to store and share mouse proteomic data from its Mouse Proteomic Technologies Initiative (MPTI). Tranche, a free and open source file sharing tool for scientific data, was one of the earliest testers of CC0. Many thanks to Tranche for providing us with such valuable early feedback on CC0.

From GenomeWeb News:

The MPTI collects tissue and serum measurements from mouse models of different types of cancers using analytical techniques such as mass spectrometry. Tranche researchers, along with University of Michigan researcher Philip Andrews, deposited nearly 1 terabyte of MPTI raw data into the Tranche network, where it can be shared between participating researchers.

The dataset is now being released in publicly accessible formats as well and is available to others in the research community. Because of the encryption used on the site, data on Tranche can be privately used by labs with access to the information until it is ready to be released to the public.

Congratulations to everyone over at Tranche and keep up the good work!”

CC Guatemala enters public discussion

Michelle Thorne, May 2nd, 2008

Today CC Guatemala’s localized license draft enters the public discussion. The CC Guatemala team, lead by Renata Avila and hosted at the Universidad Francisco Marroquin’s New Media Center, has been working through the license porting process to produce a draft of CC BY-NC-SA adapted to Guatemalan law. As part of the public discussion, we invite the international community to join the discussion and share their comments on the draft, its English re-translation, and an explanation of substantive legal changes.

Thank you and congratulations to Legal Lead Renata Avila and her colleagues at CC Guatemala!

Rockefeller U. Press Uses CC Licenses to Reduce Permission Barriers

Kaitlin Thaney, May 1st, 2008

From the Science Commons blog, Thinh Nguyen on Rockefeller University Press’ recent announcement:

“Leading by example, the Rockefeller University Press has issued a bold challenge to other non-OA publishers to find new ways to strike a balance between sustainable publishing and advancing authors’ freedoms and the public interest. The Press adopted a new copyright policy that returns essential freedoms to authors and extends permissions to the public that are vital to advancing science. This new policy covers its journals, which include the prestigious Journal of Cell Biology, The Journal of Experimental Medicine and The Journal of General Physiology.

Under the policy, there are two license periods. An initial license, available during the first six month period after publication, permits sharing and reuse of the work, but prohibits distribution through mirror sites (whether commercial or non-commercial). After this six months, the Press grants the public a standard Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. These two licenses differ only in the mirroring prohibition clause — otherwise, the conditions are essentially similar. [...]“

More after the jump …