Finland is the third country after the US and Japan to go ahead with their fully-fledged CC licences. After several months of legal deliberation the Finnish project lead Herkko Hietanen felt able to clear the licence draft and present it to the Finnish public last Monday, thus marking a major milestone in the development of…

The New York Times published an article about how the music industry influences song choice on American Idol today. I’ve long suspected that contestant song choice was limited to what the show could afford to pay in licensing costs ahead of time, since the choices of songs to cover seem limited. A producer of the…

Last night, after many months of gathering and processing great feedback from all of you, we turned on version 2.0 of the main Creative Commons licenses. The 2.0 licenses are very similar to the 1.0 licenses — in aim, in structure, and, by and large, in the text itself. We’ve included, however, a few key…

This Thursday’s Frontline on PBS is covering the modern music industry in an episode titled “The Way the Music Died“. It follows the industry rise after Woodstock in 1969, through music genre changes, and eventually how Napster and the Internet changed everything. It sounds interesting for musicians and music fans alike.

DMusic, the oldest independent digital online music community now supports Creative Commons in their upload process. More importantly though, DMusic is providing the first web-based application to embed Creative Commons license information into ID3 tags of MP3 files. Now, when you upload your MP3 file to DMusic and choose a Creative Commons license, DMusic will…

Jim will pick three to five of his favorite remixes from our remix contest to be featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered this June. The piece will be about this contest. Jim says his deadline for entries will be June 10th. We’ll still feature our favorite song on our web site as of…

Serendipity, an open-source blogging application, now has a plug-in that allows users to select a Creative Commons license.

Suw Charman has a great article on The Free Culture AudioBook Project that touches on all the reasons why an author would use a Creative Commons license, and what can come out of such an exercise. The issues around business models in publishing are also covered.

Copyfight has an interesting post on the discrepancy in congress over ClearPlay DVD players. The players automatically remove scenes that would be offensive to sensitive viewers, but do so in the comfort of one’s own home while playing standard movies on DVD. Some politicians oppose it because individuals are creating derivative works and they also…

Previous winner of a Creative Commons remix contest, Victor Stone has released a new record on Magnatune. Like his earlier Magnatune works, it is a remix album of other Magnatune artists. He’s written a great background post on the album and why he chose the artists he did.