Simon Willison's Weblog: creative-commons

Wikimedia Commons: Photographs by Gage Skidmore

2023-10-10T04:17:09+00:00

Wikimedia Commons: Photographs by Gage Skidmore

Gage Skidmore is a Wikipedia legend: this category holds 93,458 photographs taken by Gage and released under a Creative Commons license, including a vast number of celebrities taken at events like San Diego Comic-Con. CC licensed photos of celebrities are generally pretty hard to come by so if you see a photo of any celebrity on Wikipedia there’s a good chance it’s credited to Gage.

Via @visakanv

Tags: creative-commons, photography, wikipedia

Flickr Shapefiles Public Dataset 1.0

2009-05-22T18:12:10+00:00

Flickr Shapefiles Public Dataset 1.0

Another awesome Geo dataset from the Yahoo! stable—this time it’s Flickr releasing shapefiles (geometrical shapes) for hundreds of thousands of places around the world, under the CC0 license which makes them essentially public domain. The shapes themselves have been crowdsourced from geocoded photos uploaded to Flickr, where users can “correct” the textual location assigned to each photo. Combine this with the GeoPlanet WOE data and you get a huge, free dataset describing the human geography of the world.

Tags: creative-commons, crowdsourcing, flickr, geoplanet, geospatial, maps, shapefiles, yahoo

Yahoo! Geo: Announcing GeoPlanet Data

2009-05-20T21:12:24+00:00

Yahoo! Geo: Announcing GeoPlanet Data

The Yahoo! WhereOnEarth geographic data set is fantastic, but I’ve always felt slightly uncomfortable about building applications against it in case the API went away. That’s not an issue any more—the entire dataset is now available to download and use under a Creative Commons Attribution license. It’s not entirely clear what the attribution requirements are—do you have to put “data from GeoPlanet” on every page or can you get away with just tucking the attribution away in an “about this site” page? UPDATE: The data doesn’t include latitude/longitude or bounding boxes, which severely reduces its utility.

Tags: attribution, creative-commons, data, geoplanet, geospatial, whereonearth, yahoo

Map Maker for Developers

2009-02-21T09:05:57+00:00

Map Maker for Developers

Tiles from Google’s Map Maker crowdsourcing effort are now available in the JS and static maps APIs on an opt-in basis. Maybe I’m misunderstanding something here, but Google Map Maker seems like a big step backwards for open geographic data. People donate their mapping efforts to Google, who keep them—unlike OpenStreetMap, where the donated efforts are made available under a Creative Commons license.

Tags: creative-commons, crowdsourcing, google, googlemapmaker, google-maps-api, openstreetmap, staticmaps

ficlets memorial

2009-01-14T22:02:42+00:00

ficlets memorial

Here’s a great argument for Creative Commons—AOL shut down Ficlets without providing an archive or export tool, but the license meant Ficlets co-creator Kevin Lawver could scrape and preserve all of the content anyway.

Tags: aol, archive, creative-commons, data, ficlets, kevin-lawver, preservation

Dopplr: New city pages, with public tips and Creative-Commons-licenced, Flickr-powered goodness

2008-12-01T00:43:03+00:00

Dopplr: New city pages, with public tips and Creative-Commons-licenced, Flickr-powered goodness

Explains why I’ve been unable to convince any of the Dopplr crew to come out and do fun things for the past month.

Tags: creative-commons, dopplr, flickr

License Hacking

2008-11-10T22:46:21+00:00

License Hacking

Wikipedia is making the switch to a CC license, by asking the Free Software Foundation to include that as an option in the latest version of the Free Documentation License which Wikipedia currently uses and which includes an auto-upgrade clause. Devious.

Tags: creative-commons, fdl, free-software-foundation, licensing, open-source, wikipedia

Free licenses upheld by US "IP" court

2008-08-14T09:33:49+00:00

Free licenses upheld by US "IP" court

Free software and CC licenses which dictate conditions that, when violated, turn you in to a copyright infringer now have precedence in US law.

Tags: copyright, creative-commons, freesoftware, law, lawrence-lessig, licensing, open-source, uslaw

Virgin Mobile Botches Creative Commons-Driven Ad Campaign

2007-07-13T16:57:16+00:00

Virgin Mobile Botches Creative Commons-Driven Ad Campaign

Virgin Mobile Australia used CC Flickr photos (and added offensive captions) for an ad campaign, but failed to get model releases from the people in the photos. Hopefully this won’t result in a backlash against CC; it’s Virgin who are at fault.

Tags: areyouwithusorwhat, creative-commons, flickr, virgin, virginmobile

On RSS and the coming wave of content theft

2005-10-05T11:25:32+00:00

On RSS and the coming wave of content theft

A reason to avoid commercial-use-allowed Creative Commons licenses.

Tags: creative-commons

Creative commons query

2003-03-02T23:34:25+00:00

Aaron Swartz has been talking to Google about indexing Creative Commons licensed works:

From Google the news was mixed. He said he wouldn’t start indexing .0 URIs, which includes the URIs for all our licenses. He also said that he wouldn’t parse RDF for at least six months, since it required involved changes to their system and added overhead (which you need to keep down when parsing 3B pages). However, he did say that if we added <meta> tags for license information, they’d add a new search key like link: or inurl: right away, since they already had a meta tag parser.

Did they say anything about using the link element instead?

Tags: creative-commons

Creative Commons copyright link

2002-12-19T00:41:31+00:00

It's great to see the Creative Commons getting an overwhelmingly positive reception - as Lessig says on his blog, 'Tis the season to be giving, and this will be a great gift to the Commons. If you haven't seen their explanatory flash animation, Get Creative, you should really check it out.

That said, I have to admit I have a few reservations about the machine readable form of the CC licenses. The recommended way of including them in a page is RDF embedded in a comment, similar to Moveable Type's Trackback system. This is fine for HTML documents (although it feels like a bit of a cludge) but is problematic when used with XHTML. Why? Because XHTML documents are XML documents, and the XML specification states that an XML processor may, but need not, make it possible for an application to retrieve the text of comments. The logical way of extracting Creative Commons information from an XHTML document would be to parse it with an XML processor, but it is likely that many processors will be unable to extract the comments (and even those with the ability to extract them will not treat them as XML, requiring a second run of the XML parser to extract information from the RDF). In practical terms this is unlikely to be a problem as regular expressions can be used instead, but from an idealogical point of view it leaves something of a bad taste in the mouth.

If I'm going to criticise the embedded RDF approach I should probably suggest an alternative. The HTML 4 specification describes a "Copyright" link type which is defined as follows:

Copyright

Refers to a copyright statement for the current document.

I suggest using a link element in the <head> section of a document which points to the Creative Commons license governing the page in question (or to an RDF document similar to that currently used by the embedded comments method). If you view source on your page you will see that I have done exactly that.

Tags: creative-commons, lawrence-lessig