complete press contact list for creative commons

[Glenn Otis Brown <glenn AT creativecommons.org>]

press release
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Attachment: CC_Search_Press2.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

CREATIVE COMMONS’ ONE-OF-A-KIND SEARCH ENGINE DEBUTS, HERALDING 
NEXT-GENERATION WEB SEARCH FEATURES

EXTRA: The new Mozilla Firefox 1.0 browser ships with the Silicon 
Valley nonprofit’s new search technology, allowing users to comb the 
web for royalty-free content

SAN FRANCISCO, USA  November 22, 2004  Creative Commons today unveiled 
an updated beta version of its search engine, which scours the web for 
text, images, audio, and video free to re-use on certain terms  a 
search refinement offered by no other company or organization today.

Creative Commons’ announcement coincides with the Mozilla Foundation’s 
release of its industry-leading browser, Firefox 1.0, which now 
features the Creative Commons search technology in its toolbar  
alongside such leading search services as Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, 
and Dictionary.com.

“The Creative Commons search engine helps companies, educators, and 
artists find content they can re-use without having to call a lawyer, 
and it offers authors and artists who want to share their work a 
competitive advantage toward having their work discovered online,” said 
Neeru Paharia, assistant director of Creative Commons and the search 
engine’s product manager.

For example, a documentary filmmaker could use the Creative Commons 
engine to search for “images of the Eiffel Tower free for noncommercial 
use,” and incorporate any or all of the many photographs indexed. A DJ 
seeking songs free to remix or mash-up could browse listings of MP3s by 
their legal terms. An entrepreneur seeking illustrations for her 
slideshow presentation could reduce costs and liability by using a 
Creative Commons image-specific search. An educator building course 
materials could include texts and videos found by the engine.

What distinguishes the Creative Commons engine from other search 
services is that all of the above are possible without the hassle of 
rights-clearance, licensing requests, or royalty payments.

At the core of the Creative Commons search engine are two key 
innovations, one legal and one technological. First, Creative Commons 
offers authors and artists a simple, standardized way to mark their 
work as free to share or transform, on certain conditions. By applying 
a Creative Commons copyright license and (cc) notice to her work, an 
author invites the world to make certain uses of it  without giving up 
her copyright. Rather than the traditional “all rights reserved,” a 
Creative Commons license declares “some rights reserved.”

Second, and complimentary to this free legal tool, is Creative Commons 
machine-readable translation of the copyright licenses. When an author 
affixes the (cc) copyright notice to her webpage or MP3 or image file, 
it is automatically marked with Creative Commons “metadata” as well. It 
is this metadata -- akin to a library catalog card describing a 
particular book -- that the Creative Commons search engine then reads, 
processes, and presents to users as it crawls the web for their search 
requests.

The search engine was developed with the help of Nutch.org, an 
open-source search developer. See <http://nutch.org>.

Creative Commons metadata is based on a language known as Resource 
Description Framework (RDF) using Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) as 
an interchange syntax, designed and standardized by World Wide Web 
Consortium (W3C), the Web standards-setting body.

The beta search engine indexes just under one million web pages, but 
Creative Commons expects it will soon index the full five million pages 
known to carry Creative Commons licenses today.

“Creative Commons will keeping working with Nutch.org and other 
metadata initiatives to index more document types and offer 
domain-specific and reuse-specific searches,” said Mike Linksvayer, 
Chief Technical Officer of Creative Commons. “For example, to find 
music with a certain tempo or works that incorporate a specific piece 
of film footage."

About Creative Commons

A nonprofit founded in early 2002, Creative Commons promotes the 
creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works—whether owned or in 
the public domain—by empowering authors and audiences. It is sustained 
by the generous support of the Center for the Public Domain, the John 
D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and the 
Hewlett Foundation.

For general information, visit <http://creativecommons.org>.






Contact

Neeru Paharia (San Francisco)
Assistant Director, Creative Commons
415.946.3068
neeru AT creativecommons.org

Press Kit

http://creativecommons.org/presskit/






Glenn Otis Brown
Executive Director
Creative Commons
glenn AT creativecommons.org
+1.415.946.3065 (telephone)
+1.415.336.1433 (mobile)
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(cc) Some rights reserved.
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