Last Saturday was Creative Commons’s fifth birthday and all over the world, local CC organizations held celebrations where announcement after announcement got made about amazing new stuff in the world of Creative Commons. Larry Lessig has posted a roundup of all the announcements and it’s heart-pounding stuff. Here’s just a few examples:
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# Legal Commons (beta): Taking inspiration from the liberator and manumitter of government documents and legal cases, Carl Malamud, Creative Commons will enter into a joint venture with public.resource.org to collect and make available machine readable copies of government documents and law. Carl and I have committed to freeing all federal case law by the end of 2008. Importantly, this effort will not set up competing systems to the emerging ecology of great free law services (Cornell’s LII, or Columbia’s Altlaw.org). We instead will help gather and make available the resources those services use to provide their amazing service. So look for a tarball of all federal cases by the end of 2008, in parsable and usable plain text.
# CC+: This protocol enables a simple click through ability to get rights or permissions beyond those provided by a CC license. So, e.g., a Flickr photo licensed under a BY-NC license could have a simple click through to some agent to provide commercial rights for that photo. We announced with a bunch of partners already. But really key was:
# Yahoo announced it was baking CC+ “into the system” of Yahoo, making it possible for any Yahoo service to offer content using the CC+ infrastructure.