Posts Tagged ‘creative commons’

Creative Commons PowerPoint from Alvin Trusty on Vimeo.

I met Lawrence Lessig this evening (he’s the skinny one in the picture).  He gave a lecture at BGSU – From Copyright to Corruption and Back Again.  The talk was a little less than an hour and in true Lessig style had more than 650 slides.  I talked with him for a few minutes before his presentation.  I only had time for a couple of questions.

Q1 – Who is the tougher crowd?  A room full of college students or the US Supreme Court?

A1 – Definitely the college students.

Q2 – Who will win in the end?  Shepard Fairey, Mannie Garcia or the Associated Press?

A2 – I actually represent Shepard, so I’m a little biased.  He will win.

It was a pleasure to meet the founder of the Creative Commons foundation.  Lessig said (for the first time in public) that more than 350,000,000 works have been licensed with some form of Creative Commons.  He talked mostly about copyright, but has shifted his energy to a campaign against corruption.  Combining the efforts of Change Congress with a new (yet to be named) group, the goal is to change the way money gets to politicians.  One statistic he gave was that the average investment with a lobbyist in Washington D.C. gives a 22,000% return.  He then gave example after example of how congress has made the wrong choice in legislation, choosing the side of the lobbyists over represented constituents.  If the money can be taken out of the equation, politicians should stop voting like idiots and start representing the people who elected them.

The talk was informative, entertaining and inspiring.  If you have the chance to sit in on a lecture, I highly recommend it.

I have been a big fan of Flickrleech for more than a year.  The site uses the Flickr API to search photos on the Flickr site.  The draw is the interface.  Instead of showing ten pictures per page, Flickrleech shows 200.  It makes scanning for a picture much quicker.

Now Flickrleech has added the ability to isolate only picture licensed as Creative Commons.  The feature isn’t obvious on the main page, but once you find it, it’s easy to use.

Do a normal search and then click the advanced search link.  This will open a window with a list of options.  Licenses are at the bottom.

There are six different Creative Commons licenses offered on Flickr.  If you would like to select more than one, hold down the CTRL key while making the selects.

After the search is complete, clicking any photo listed will open that photo on the official Flickr site.  That makes it easy to grab attribution credentials and other information.  The best Flickr search tool just got better.