I recently ran across Doctor Paradox (a.k.a. Barb). She creates very funky, fun, and creative sample-loop-based music using Ableton Live and other tools for the Mac. I recently spoke with her about CC licensing, found art in remixes, and music in general. Apparently I caught her in the middle of reading Larry Lessig’s The Future…

MIT’s The Tech newspaper recently sat down with Motion Picture Association of America head Jack Valenti for an interview about digital rights. The writer, a MIT engineering student, probes (perhaps a bit too tenaciously) the bad side of the DMCA, namely DVD encryption and playback on Linux, which is currently illegal. In the end it’s…

Audioscrobbler is an amazing community music tracking application that is really starting to gain some steam. The premise is pretty simple, you run a small app on your deskop which sends information about what songs you are playing on your computer’s MP3/CD player. Now that they have thousands of regular users, they aggregate the information…

The Open Clip Art Project is a new effort to catalog and encourage the creation of new clip art using the Creative Commons public domain dedication. Providing clipart for open source productivity applications is one of OCAP’s goals. Contribute your clipart creations now, perhaps your work will one day be available to OpenOffice‘s millions of…

Last week, the Creative Commons licences were presented by Massimo Travostino at the Settimana delle liberta in Florence, Italy. The week-long conference also featured presentations by Richard Stallman of the FSF and Sergio Amadeu of the Brazilian Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia da Informação. The Italian mailing list – where the local draft licences are currently…

Il Forno is a baking weblog based in Germany that is licensed under Creative Commons. There are many recipes posted, especially in the bread making category and when you consider the way recipes are passed from one generation to the next, it would seem that Creative Commons licenses would be a natural for cooking communities…

In the first quarter of the current year, iCommons has made significant progress in porting the CC licences – based on US-copyright law – to other jurisdictions, thereby internationalizing the movement. By early April, three European countries (Germany, Croatia and the Netherlands) as well as Australia and Jordan had come up with the first drafts…

AGNULA Music Libre, a new database of libre music (which includes music licensed under the CC Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike licenses), launched last month. The site has adopted CC’s license embedding strategy, publishing RDF backing license claims made in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files.

iRATE radio has placed 3,000 CC-licensed tracks from the non-evil Magnatune label into “rotation.” iRATE is a collaborative filtering system for music. The first song new users have the opportunity to rate is Monsters from Magnatune artist Beth Quist. A future iRATE skin will include CC license indicators in the main display. Here’s a sneak…

Public discussion on the Creative Commons translation license starts this Monday (April 26). The translation license would be used by authors who want to make their works available for others to translate into local languages. The initial idea for the license came from a lecturer at a conference in South Africa in January this year.…