I really believe that we've reached a critical moment in the adoption of Creative Commons and that all of the pieces are coming together. We are making huge strides in Science, Education and Culture in both the legal and technical specifications for the interoperability that allows frictionless sharing. The impact on all sectors will be huge and I think it will affect everyone.

The campaign this year has an interesting twist. As you may know, we've been exploring the idea of a copyright registry. One of the key components of such a registry is user authentication. We realized that whenever someone donates to Creative Commons, we have a basic authentication of sorts. We also realized that CC has a decent brand and we decided to test the idea of giving a CC OpenID to everyone who gives during this campaign. We're not sure exactly how this initiative is going to develop, but we'd love your feedback on how you like it and what you think we can do with this. We've tied in some other neat license related stuff in addition to the OpenID which I'll blog about later today in more detail. You can test this OpenID thing by making a contribution. ;-)

We're also launching a video project asking for people to contribute 90-second videos explaining how you use CC and why you support CC. This should be very cool and would REALLY love for you to participate and pass this on to anyone you think who might have a good story to tell. Jesse Dylan, per my previous post, has made a great short video about CC. Hopefully this will inspire you. Remember that you're free to reuse/remix this in making your own story.

We need to raise $500,000 by the end of the year. If you are a corporation and would like to try the matching gift program, that seems to work well too. We really need your help. Thanks.

You can find the press release for the CC Network and the Jesse Dylan video for more information.

Creative Commons Website

We were fortunate to have renowned filmmaker Jesse Dylan (director of the Emmy Award-winning "Yes We Can" video) offer to create a short film explaining the ideas behind Creative Commons. He interviewed CC board members Hal Abelson, James Boyle, Joi Ito, Michael Carroll, Lawrence Lessig, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, Eric Saltzman, Jimmy Wales, and Laurie Racine and used the results as the basis for this terrific piece, entitled A Shared - Culture.

Download

A Shared Culture is available in several formats:

• Quicktime (web)
• Ogg Theora (HD)
• Original (755mb .torrent)

License

Creative Commons License

A Shared Culture by Jesse Dylan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike (CC BY-NC-SA) license.

See the page on the Creative Commons website for a wonderful list of all of the attributions for the works used to make this video.

Also, the Creative Commons annual fund raising campaign starts today. I'll post more about this later today, but your support again this year would be greatly appreciated.