Rufus Pollock, co-founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation (and Cambridge University economist) talks about the importance of making data and information open and useful to the world.

I geek out the future of content licensing with Mike Linksvayer, VP of Creative Commons. We talk about why governments probably should avoid using licenses altogether and why social benefit organizations need to open their thinking as they open and share more of their content.

My hobby is making music. I co-own a netlabel called Negative Sound Institute, and have had Creative Commons releases of ambient and chill electronic music on a Creative Commons basis on various labels.

Lately, I enjoy remixing spoken word tracks into my music, to create songs and videos. I have enjoyed making a few socially conscious youtube videos as a method of relatively low-sophistication viral marketing.

I would be very interested in making simple viral video, with soundtrack, song, and Creative Commons photo footage, to assist non-profits. I am particularly interested in animal adoption issues, and yet there are so many things I support that I would love to help promote in this modest way.

Yesterday Interplast announced that “A Story of Healing,” has been re-released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical-No Derivatives license (by-nc-nd) and is available for free online. This is the first time that an Academy Award® winning film has been licensed under any Creative Commons license.

When you click on the advertisement for Pinnacle Studios at the end of the Creative Commons' video, "Wanna Work Together?" Creative Commons receives 100% of the ad's revenue. 

The video is hosted by Revver, a video-sharing platform that uses Creative Commons licenses to help creators make money from their work. Revver attaches an ad at the end of each video on its network. When a viewer clicks on the ad, Revver splits the ad revenue with the video's creator. Usually, it is a 50/50 split, but Revver is giving Creative Commons 100% of the money for their videos till December 31, 2006.

Our fabulous volunteer podcaster, David Collin, recorded Mike Linksvayer's presentation on Cultural Environmentalism during the last San Francisco Net Tuesday, along with an interview with him.  You can hear it now on our Odeo channel

We'll be holding San Francisco's Net Tuesday at the NetSquared home base, CompuMentor, at 322 Ritch St. in SOMA from 6-8 PM on June 13th.  Mike Linksvayer the CTO of Creative Commons, will talk briefly about sustainable culture and answer questions.  There will be food, drinks and free wifi, so come on ova.

RSVP on Upcoming or Meetup.

Okay, so the headline of this post isn't entirely accurate. The next Creative Commons Salon isn't going to be all about content distribution for nonprofits -- that's just a five minute talk I'm going to be giving (from the perspective of TechSoup's experiences adopting a Creative Commons licensing policy.) The rest of it will be about all sorts of other cool stuff, so you should show up. Here's the deal:

Wednesday, June 14 in San Francisco: CC Salon

It's time for another CC Salon in San Francisco. Please join us on Wednesday, June 14, from 6-9pm at Shine, (1337 Mission Street between 9th and 10th Streets). Note: Since Shine is a bar, this month's Salon is only open to people who are 21 and older.

Thought you all might be interested to know that all Creative Commons content published on TechSoup and ConsultantCommons is being index by Google -- which means our nonprofit friends can easily search our sites for articles they can republish.

To use the search, start here: http://creativecommons.org/find/ Limit your search to a specific site by using the "site:techsoup.org" qualifier in your search query, like so:

site:techsoup.org blogging

site:techsoup.org interplast

site:techsoup.org security

You get back a list of articles relating to those topics, all of which nonprofits can reuse in their training materials, reprint on their Web sites, use in presentations, etc., etc. Have fun, do good!

Mike Linksvayer is the Chief Technology Officer for Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that offers flexible copyright licenses for creative works.  This is done with the belief that collaboration is a key element of creativity and progress, but that standard copyright is too restrictive for participants throughout the creative process.

Creative Commons (CC) licenses have now been ported into 30 legal jurisdictions around the world and are used in a wide variety of fields, from music to science to art and literature.