Posts Tagged 'Creative Commons'
Last week our director gave us the go-ahead to put our early literacy video, Growing Readers, under a BY-NC-ND Creative Commons license. This is exciting for several reasons. What this means is that anybody who wants to is now free to screen, copy and distribute our video as long as 1) we get credit, 2) no one is making a profit from it and 3) the video isn’t modified in any way. Any group, institution or individual is free to show and share this video without worrying about obtaining our permission. The BY-NC-ND CC license is the most restrictive, and is sometimes referred to as the “free publicity” license in that it essentially encourages the sharing and distribution of the licensed work while prohibiting any modifications from being made.
This seems to fall in line beautifully with what libraries are about- the free sharing of information. I hope to see other libraries and non-profit educational and cultural institutions that produce media looking to Creative Commons as an alternative to traditional copyright. It seems to me that releasing work under this type of license could only benefit the participating institutions- it’s a great way to encourage people to find, use, and share your work with others.
I’ll be uploading and linking to Growing Readers soon- both the English and Spanish versions!
I’ll write on this later…
I made this for a video I’m working on but I thought I would share it. I’ve decided to license all my video work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, so I thought it would be nice to have a nifty end title. , or !
This clip is in the public domain. Happy Wednesday.
Jem Cohen made this short film for Renew Media to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their Media Arts Fellowship. The film has an license under Creative Commons. It’s very simple- one static shot with people moving in and out of the frame. But it’s still recognizably Jem Cohen- a poetic observation.
I saw Jem’s 1996 film Lost Book Found when I was in school, and it completely changed how I thought about making videos. Lost Book Found is an intimate, layered portrait of the unseen or unnoticed corners of a city. The film, which Cohen shot over five years while working as a roasted peanut vendor on the streets of New York, centers around a mysterious notebook full of detailed lists and descriptions of locations, objects and events.
I was intrigued by Cohen’s working method- the idea that he would first set about amassing an archive of completely unplanned, unscripted film clips, and then begin to sift through them to see what kind of narrative might emerge, was really exciting to me. He took on the role of visual anthropologist- collecting bits and fragments here and there, patiently building a library of information, until he could examine the pieces together to decipher the messages they had hidden in their depths.
Jem wrapped up work on six collaborative films with Patti Smith earlier this year, including one called For Walter Benjamin. Uh, rad.
