Creative Commons

September Newsletter: Success stories, challenging AT&T, and Blogworld 2011

Our September newsletter brings news of success stories fighting DMCA abuse, a grant awarded by the California Consumer Protection Foundation, and our continuing efforts to stop the AT&T-Tmobile merger. 

You can also catch us in person at Media Law in the Digital Age in October, a conference coproduced by Harvard Berkman Center's Digital Media Law Project and the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University, as well as Blogworld 2011 in LA in November.

Youtube offers of one out of six Creative Commons licenses, sends mixed messages

New Media Rights offers legal help to creators on the use of Creative Commons licenses. We were interested to see how Youtube has recently begun to incorporate this progressive licensing structure into their video options. Although we welcome Creative Commons license inclusion into Youtube's service, the way that Youtube has rolled out its CC license options raises serious questions about the future of the online video ecosystem and how "open" that ecosystem will be.

Open Attribute, a simple way to attribute Creative Commons licensed works on the web

Open Attribute - Creative Commons

A big shoutout from New Media Rights to the entire team that has put together OpenAttribute

OpenAttribute simplifies the process of attributing an openly licensed piece of content, by providing a quick link where you can get an HTML or plain text attribution. Paste this code or plain text whereever you are reusing the Creative Commons licensed work, and you can have a properly formatted attribution.

I encourage you to go install this right away and start improving your attributions today!

Data portability policies to ensure and open and competitive internet - an idea whose time has come?

Data Portability Icon - CC-BY 2.0

I recently shared the concept of developing data portability policies, standards, and best practices as a potential project for New Media Rights' Drumbeat San Diego event, and as project that could fit within Mozilla's larger Drumbeat initiative fostering projects that celebrate and ensure and open web.

This project begins with the concept that user choice, and user control over their experience, should remain a distinguishing feature of the open internet.

To maintain a healthy competition amongst online services heavily reliant on user-submitted data, it will become increasingly important to make sure user data is easily portable. This will help ensure that popular services make changes according to the interests of their users, and that new services can compete on the basis of their merits and usability, without artificial barriers to competition. Keeping data in the hands of users, rather than allowing confusing legal and technological techniques to lock upconsumer data, will help ensure an open and competitive internet.

Legal and How-to Guides for Independent Creators, Internet Users, nonprofits, and small businesses

Our educational guides are organized by category and title below. We also have the Fair Use app and 150+ video guides available.  You can check out our video legal guides by clicking here!  You can also buy our new book Don't Panic, a plain language legal guide that every creator and business should have when starting a project.

New Media Rights Guides are available to browse, read and learn from. They are organized by category and title.

Webtreats Glowing Neon Social Media Icons by Flickr user webtreats used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license

Best Practices for Creative Commons attributions - how to attribute works you reuse under a Creative Commons license

Find out how to cite or attribute Creative Commons work. Creative commons licenses allows you to share, remix and reuse the work legally, just make sure to check out the conditions of the license!

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