J.D. Lasica has a new feature in the online magazine Mindjack entitled “The Killing Fields: Copyright Law and its Challengers.” It’s an overview of Jed Horowitz’ struggles with Disney and his film about overreaching copyright, Willful Infringement. An snippet from the article: At various points, the iconoclastic Horowitz appears on camera, appearing dumbfounded at the…

We’re hosting a very short notice music metadata summit tomorrow 3-6PM (Pacific) on the Stanford campus and online (IRC). We hope to come to decisions on several concrete issues, including metadata for tipjars, license buyouts, purchasing, and “remix ready” content as well as discuss how various music metadata-related projects can better collaborate and encourage adoption…

Rick Prelinger, of the Prelinger Archives, got his letter to the editor published in today’s New York Times. In it he points to the positive free distribution aspects of digitizing and sharing his works under the public domain: Our experience may seem counterintuitive, but it has been overwhelmingly positive: the more we give away, the…

Some Creative Commons-licensed, political-mash music from “the Internet’s first virtual band.”

I watch the Internet Archive’s Open Source Audio area for material that could be used for legal remixes including spoken word audio. In wonderful news, this morning’s postings include Andrew Levine’s audio reading of the first chapter to Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. The book had been available online under a…

Sometimes people ask us why we created the Creative Commons, and we often say that we wanted there to be an easy way for you to share your creations and also to build a large pool of creative work that is easy to redistribute, print, (and if the license allows) collage, remix, or even sell…

A New York Times article recently pointed to Tell Tale Weekly, an audio book site selling MP3s as cheap as $0.25 each. They’ve also committed to licensing the books under a Creative Commons license after 5 years or 100k downloads, whichever comes first. It’s not easy to find good, cheap, DRM-free audiobooks and Tell Tale…

“New ‘some-rights-reserved’ music licence from Creative Commons” by Leigh Phillips

“Lottery Numbers and Books With a Voice” by Pamela LiCalzi O’Connell

“I share, you rip off, they pirate” by Bill Thompson