Today while I was at a web conference, a speaker used an incredible MIT Media Lab project as a demo during a talk. Check out the I/O brush project. The project appears to be a camera that can take a photo still or video of anything you point it at, then the captured images can…

One of the larger and more interesting questions arising in connection with Creative Commons’s global expansion is the question of whether the various iCommons licences are internationally compatible. The question arises because porting / transposing the CC licenses into diffferent jurisdictions involves a process of both translation and legal adapation. The latter is made necessary…

We’re moving our offices to San Francisco tomorrow. I’m packing boxes. Just noticed that our Fellowes brand cardboard file boxes carry a copyright notice: (c) Copyright 2001 Fellowes, Inc. Sure am glad they included that. Was about to pirate.

Renaldo “Recombo” Lemos of Creative Commons Brazil reports more good news: “Following the same steps of Gilberto Gil and Mombojo, the Brazilian electronic group Gerador Zero has decided to go Recombo. Gerador Zero is one of the most inventive music projects in Brazil. Fabio FZero, their mastermind, has managed to create music that is hard…

Lou Reed is another artist that should check out the Recombo license. Here’s a great quote from him about his most recent recordings being remixed in this story: “I’ve been getting all these great mixes sent to me out of the U.K. for years and years,” he told Attitude magazine, “and I just started saying…

People who study race, gender, and anthropology sometimes talk about “code-switching“: the way a person who straddles different cultures (poor and rich, minority and majority, north and south) learns to toggle between the lingo and mannerisms of each to survive, or in some cases, thrive. One of the several “ah ha!” moments of Siva Vaidhyanathan‘s…

Since I first implemented ccValidator late last year, I’ve been encouraged by the amount of feedback and suggestions I’ve received. Common-ers everywhere have pointed out bugs, suggested improvements and encouraged it’s development into a useful tool. Today, ccValidator has a new home: validator.creativecommons.org and a handful of new features. The validator now supports metadata specified…

“Germany debuts Creative Commons” by Monika Ermert

The Washington Post has a nice article about the innovative and all-around-fantastic Public Radio Exchange today. PRX bills itself as “an online service for peer-review and digital distribution of public radio programming”: it’s a low-friction clearinghouse for great radio. In the words of the article: Every minute of every hour, great gobs of fantastic, imaginative…

“BBC to Open Content Floodgates” by Katie Dean