‘A Shared Culture’

Creative Commons is in the midst of its 2008 fundraising campaign. Find out how you can support Creative Commons at our support site.

To celebrate the campaign, Creative Commons has released “A Shared Culture,” a short video by renowned filmmaker Jesse Dylan. Known for helming a variety of films, music videos, and the Emmy Award-winning “Yes We Can” Barack Obama campaign video collaboration with rapper will.i.am, Dylan created “A Shared Culture” to help spread the word about the Creative Commons mission.

In the video, some of the leading thinkers behind Creative Commons describe how the organization is helping “save the world from failed sharing” through free tools that enable creators to easily make their work available to the public for legal sharing and remix. Dylan puts the Creative Commons system into action by punctuating the interview footage with dozens of photos that have been offered to the public for use under CC licenses. Similarly, he used two CC-licensed instrumental pieces by Nine Inch Nails as the video’s soundtrack music. These tracks, “17 Ghosts II” and “21 Ghosts III,” come from the Nine Inch Nails album Ghosts I-IV, which was released earlier this year under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.

What’s fun about this project is that I used two new sites in the commons space, ImageStamper.com and LegalTorrents.com. Legal Torrents has the original file here, and you can see all the proper attributions for the photos used in video at the bottom of the main page, where each has a link to a permanent time stamp that lives on the ImageStamper site.

2 comments
  1. i hate to get all sarah palin on you because i 90% love this video. i just have to admit to how striking it is that the video is dominated by white men of roughly similar ages. perhaps that is the audience who will be donating?

  2. Yah — they’re actually just CC’s board, so that was the casting decision.

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