From a cold Beijing, that is amazingly cleaned up and metropolitan, merry xmas and happy holidays and happy new year!
Most importantly, happy 1 year anniversary to Lu for being married for one year (to me)! Its taken a massive amount of engineering to get here right now and to have some degrees of freedom for our lives, so pretty happy about that overall!
Now its time for me, my mom, dad, Lu and I to take 24 hour train to Guangzhou…geez, I miss my 14 hour battery now
Time to get sentimental and see some amazing country-side while my real imagination comes true. Time to hack on OpenMoko and Open Clip Art Library while on the train
BTW, while waiting for my parents at the Beijing International Airport, I decided to break from that activity to find the atm. While walking towards it, out from the domestic terminal came the the worlds tallest man!!!
I stopped dead in my track and like the other Chinese folks around me, pulled out my phone and took a picture!
I see CC+ is blowing up on the web today. NOTE: It is NOT a new license, but a facilitation of morePermissions beyond ANY standard CC licenses. CC+ is CC license + Another agreement.
One goal is to help semanticize commercial transactions for free flow of business transactions, but also, to provide a mechanism to enable commercial interoperability on multiple levels. Yahoo! has integrated it at the “system level” so hopefully will get more adoption because of that as well…
I have been working overtime on getting this project launched on the Creative Commons side, and has been one of my major projects (along with working on Open Library, adding CC licensing to OLPC, and many other fund tasks. NOTE: All of these projects are great projects which involve so many more people than just me…I am just an instigator/agitator a lot of the time now
We are very excited to announce the launch of the CC+ (aka CC Plus) and CC0 (aka CC Zero) programs. These are major additions to the Creative Commons array of legal tools.
In a nutshell, CC+ is a protocol to enable a simple way for users to get rights beyond those granted by a CC license. Meanwhile, CC0 is a protocol that enables people to either assert that a work has no legal restrictions attached to it or waive any rights associated with a work so it has no legal restrictions attached to it. The program also provides an easy way to sign these assertions or waivers.
Please read our press release about the launch of CC+ and CC0 for more information about how they work and who we’re collaborating with.
I’ll be writing more about CC0 (CCZero) shortly and how this will be a brilliant project for Open Clip Art Library, Open Font Library and other free and open content projects.
I realized that I am now in one of the most copyright-free zones: Guangzhou, China. This is the place where fashion designers unique designs are instantly copied. It is possibly one of the places where the barriers to creation are removed (or ignored) and you can find popular software and movies every few feet for a few dollars.
I will write more about this, but for now, I want everyone to know that myself and lu are spending the next few months (until end of May 2008) in China as our main base where I’ll continue to work for Creative Commons doing BizDev and Community Management, and will keep pushing on all my other projects. BTW, Lu and I still live in San Francisco. Our home-base is there, but we want to lock down our Chinese-base now
So, if you are in and around China: Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul, Tokyo and so on, please do shoot me an email and lets get things (more) cooking.
For now, I’m going on vacation until right after the new year and will emerge and first off head to Workshop on Asia and Commons in Taiwan January 17. If you are in the region, it will be a brilliant meeting that will entail OpenMoko folks, Sony folks, Mike Linksvayer, and so many more people working on building the commons.
In the meantime, check out this great video made by a famous hiphop artist in Korea with video made by an artist in the community to explain Creative Commons to others:
