CCau is very proud to wish our free culture brothers across at GNU a very happy 25th birthday.

25 years ago today (ok, so it was yesterday - but it's still 2 September in most parts of the world) Richard Stallman and his collaborators began a project to develop an operating system that could be legally used, improved on and tinkered with by programmers everywhere. In doing so, they pretty much invented the free software movement. Which in turn led to open content licensing, the free culture movement, and Creative Commons.

Software from GNU ("Gnu is Not Unix") now powers everything from Apple OS X to the Firefox web browser to the software behind internet itself. Their social influence has, perhaps, been even greater, encouraging us all to rethink what 'ownership' means, and what rights we should have over our own culture.

So we join British comedian Stephen Fry and the rest of the CC community in wishing GNU 25 more years of setting the standards for freedom everywhere. And another 25 after that. And another.

The Melbourne Fringe Festival's fabulous Digital Fringe program has issued a call out for material and screens for its 2008 program (24 September to 12 October).

Run out of the experimental media bar, Horse Bazaar (one of my favourite places in Melbourne - check out the men's toilets!), Digital Fringe showcases the work of emerging and established new media artists on hundreds of screens across Victoria. Contributions can be from anywhere in the world and can be in any form, from works by professional artists to kindergarten multimedia projects and everything in between. You provide the material, they provide the novel environment - whether it be a bar, a gallery, a wall or even a mobile phone. They even have a Mobile Projection Unit, which moves around Melbourne from dusk, projecting onto buildings and structures and interacting with the citylife and local goings on.

Federation Square by edwin.11

Those in Melbourne over the weekend might want to check out Remix My Lit's exciting live remixing event.

As part of the Melbourne Writers' Festival, from 3:30-4:30pm on Saturday (30 September) the Big Screen in Federation Square will be dedicated to the live multimedia remix of RML stories. Tales by authors such as Cate Kennedy, James Phelan, Kim Wilkins and Danielle Wood will be stretched, tweaked, mashed and generally brought to life in a set by A/V artist M.

Australia's iconic public broadcaster, the ABC, has just launched a new CC-friendly social media space, Pool, designed to provide a "place for creative content makers to upload their work, publish and collaborate."

Pool lets creators working in all mediums - from animation, to music, to video, to text - share and broadcast their work to others. Like most participatory media sites, users can create profiles, upload and download material, and search tags for related material. But unlike other popular sites, the focus at Pool is very clearly on quality and experimentation.

Most exciting from our end, Pool has been designed to be a completely open project. The site (which has been developed using the open source content management tool, Drupal) offers the full suite of the Creative Commons core licences (as well as All Rights Reserved), and actively encourages those uploading material to use the licences to "declare a relationship between your content and other content".

CCau's sister project, Remix My Lit, has declared August to be remix month. They have 9 new short stories up, all written by prominent Australian authors - from ABC Fiction Award winner Damian MacDonald to best seller Kim Wilkins. And all licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike licence - just waiting for you to rework, remix and reinvent.

The CC licences are, of course, perpetual - you're free to use the stories anytime. But if you send your remixes to anthology@creativecommons.org.au before 31 August you'll get your story posted on the website, and have a chance for it to be published in the hard copy anthology alongside your favourite author.

So get to it. And if you want to know more about remixing literature, join the Remix My Lit team at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival for two events:

Those who have been following the CC Case Studies wiki will be familiar with Ancient Free Gardeners, a Melbourne-based indie band who use CC licences to distribute their music. We're very pleased to announce that AFG have released their new single, Innards Out, under a CC BY-NC-SA licence, which allows it to be freely distributed and even remixed. And they're getting quite a bit of attention from it.

Since their launch a couple of weeks ago they've been getting airplay on community radio, been promoted on a number of prominent music blogs, and have even been interviewed about their decision. Most importantly, the single has been downloaded several thousand times from their website - they even had to upgrade their servers to cope with the demand. And they attribute a good part of this attention to the CC licensing.

Those who have been following the international CC blog will know that over the last month CC has launched an exciting new initiative - the CC Case Study Wiki. This is a place for people to upload stories of the commons - the whys, hows and wherefores of successful Creative Commons practitioners from around the world.

What you might not have realised is that CC Australia, and in particular staffer Rachel Cobcroft, played a major role in the project - helping to design the wiki and providing the initial group of more than 50 case studies, drawing on material we've been collating from the CC community in Australia and the region for the last few years.

In the lead up to our Building an Australasian Commons event, CCau is very pleased to announce that we have (finally) finished the first drafts of our version 3.0 licences. Once these are finalised and officially launched, the Australian licences will be up-to-date with the latest version of the CC licences internationally.

But before we finalise them, we thought we'd see what others had to say about them. So we're releasing two of the draft licences for public consultation:

Attribution (BY) and

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA).

We've decided to do this for two reasons:

1. we believe in crowd sourcing - the more eyeballs who look at the licences before they go live, the better; and
   
2. we value your input - we want to make sure that the Australian CC community is happy with the changes to the licences, and get feedback on any other changes you'd like.
   

Getting everyone's feedback on the v3.0 licences is particularly important because we've decided to depart slightly from our traditional drafting approach.

In the spirit of the upcoming Building an Australiaisan Commons conference here in Australia exciting stories of Creative Commons’ proliferation in the Asia-Pacific are spurring quite a buzz. An inspiring story out of New Zealand over the weekend that CCANZ let us know about; local NZ band Knives at Noon were on Channel 3 talking about why they release their music under BY-NC-SA 3.0 New Zealand licence.

In the article keyboardist Oli Wilson says they built a fanbase through their MySpace but wanted to see their music have a 'life of its own'. As Oliver says, "...we relinquish the right for people to copy it, they're allowed to burn it, and they're allowed to download it, and they're allowed to sample and remix it." In the lead up to their first national tour (in New Zealand) it is pretty awesome to have a string of remixes attached to your songs, especially when they are from producers both in New Zealand and overseas.

It's World IP day this week and how better to celebrate than coming along to a free half day seminar on Maximising Creative Value and IP?

It's being run by QUT's Creative Industries Faculty, and goes from 1:45pm this Wednesday (not strictly World IP day, but close enough) at QUT's Kelvin Grove campus, here in Brisbane.

It looks like an interesting program, with lots of discussion of how to utilise new technologies to create business and innovation models for the creative industries. Jessica Coates of CCau will be presenting, along with:

* Anna Rooke, CEO, Creative Industries Precinct Pty Ltd
* Suzannah Conway, Chief Executive Officer, Australasian CRC for Interaction Design
* Regan Gourley, Patent Attorney, Cullen & Co.
* Matthew Tobin, Creative Director, Urban Arts Projects
* Christina Waterson, Architectural Artist