Recently, there has been an increase in threatened and actual lawsuits involving CC licensed works, and in some cases, license enforcement has even become a business model. We have now learned that even long-time friend and contributor to Creative Commons, Cory Doctorow, has been targeted. Put simply, “license-enforcement-as-business model” is a perversion of the founding…

Until now, the only way to mix your microblog and Creative Commons licenses was to sign up for the free-as-in-speech service identi.ca (or run your own instance of Laconica), which requires all posts to be under our Attribution license. But as of February 18th, thanks to the work of UK author Andy Clarke, you can…

Thanks again to everyone who participated in Creative Commons’ 2007 Annual Fundraising Campaign. We received financial support from individuals in 52 jurisdictions and many companies, totaling $601,976. Your support, however you’re able to give it, is what sustains and drives CC. This was our third annual campaign (and the second I’ve been involved with) and…

On January 15 we launched discussion of two new tools in a beta US version, both branded “CC0” — a Waiver of all copyrights in a work, and an Assertion that there are no copyrights in a work. After taking account of your feedback (thank you!), a lot of internal discussion has led us to…

Debate over whether it makes sense to syndicate complete posts or only excerpts pops up regularly, most recently in reaction to the popular Freakonomics blog moving to the New York TImes, which brought with it a move to partial feeds. The idea of partial feeds is to make readers go to the syndicating site to…

John Panzer of AOL has been writing about feed licensing. His recommendation: So, here’s my new summary, which is shorter but more complicated: Support and promote feed standards for embedded licenses. Allow fair use for unlicensed feed content. You’ll need to consult your legal department on what fair use is in each case, and figure…

Feedster, the RSS search engine, now understands Creative Commons licenses found in feeds. This marks one of the first search engines of any sort to recognize our metadata and display information about it. They’ll start implementing them on search results and cache pages soon but are open to other suggestions for use.

Syndic8, a central repository for syndicated news feeds, has recently started tracking the use of Creative Commons licenses in feeds. They’ve got a growing list here.

Just in time for the new year, we’re pleased to announce the new Creative Commons Weblog and associated RSS feed.

Climate change, and the resulting harm to our global biodiversity, is one of the world’s most pressing challenges. Creative Commons (CC) and its partners SPARC and EIFL have launched a global Open Climate Campaign to make the open sharing of research the norm in climate science. CC is looking for an experienced and well-organized Open…