Creative Commons recently offered catalyst grants to help spur awareness and use of Creative Commons.

Two grants have been proposed from Austin, one studying the music scene and one promoting the literature scene.

You can support either of the projects in the dicusssion part of the page describing the full project.

Mapping Austin’s Music Ecosystem

The following proposes the examination of Creative Commons (CC) licensing and its adoption among musicians in the Austin area, often called the live music capital of the world. The study attempts to answer the following question: What considerations determine whether musicians adopt CC licenses for their work? While there are a handful of related works and case studies that bring to light, “how many use CC licenses”, there remains a considerable gap in volume and quality of content. We propose to expand the research and to examine the local music ecosystem in-depth

Full Description and Discussion

Common Quill

This project would produce a web site hosting CC and public domain fiction allowing derivative works. Inpiduals will be able to borrow a character, place, creature, thing or theme from a story and create a derivative work. You will also be able to view the creative DNA of a work, much like CC Mixter, by seeing where a character or work originated and who has remixed it.

Full Description and Discussion

EFF-Austin invites you to a talk by the Free Software Foundation Activist – Richard Stallman on 23rd April 2009.

• Location: National Instruments, 11500 N MO Pac Expy, Austin, TX 78759
• Time: 6PM – 8PM
• Entry: Free, but registration required due to limited seating. Register here.
• Refreshments provided.

Talk Abstract:
Richard Stallman wrote the first GNU General Public License in 1989, and version 3 which was completed in 2007. He will discuss the philosophy of the GNU GPL, the changes made in version 3, and the reasons for those changes.

A must attend for software enthusiasts, developers, entrepreneurs, managers, and students. There is limited seating at the venue: first come, first served registration will apply.

Speaker Bio:
Richard Stallman launched the development of the GNU operating system (see www.gnu.org) in 1984. GNU is free software: everyone has the freedom to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small. The GNU/Linux system, basically the GNU operating system with Linux added, is used on tens of millions of computers today. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship,the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer award, and the the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several honorary doctorates.

Thanks to Saurabh Sureka (sab at ieee.org) for coordinating the presentation.