The fourth season of the animated series Odd Job Jack (featuring stars like Jason Alexander, John Goodman, Christian Slater, Molly Parker, and Jerry Stiller) began airing recently on Canada’s Comedy Network. The show is a riot – each episode follows a temp worker through a different employment misadventure (i.e. mortuary worker, security guard, “rodent wrangler”).…

When you select a license using the Creative Commons license engine, we return a block of HTML you can place on your web page to mark that you’ve licensed your content. Included in that block of HTML is embedded metadata that programs can detect in order to determine which license you have selected. We’ve had…

A new release of web-based office suite (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation) ThinkFree Online adds the ability for users to mark their documents as CC licensed in ThinkFree’s DocExchange sharing portal. From ThinkFree’s announcement: “We’re particularly excited to see Creative Commons features integrated throughout ThinkFree Online’s workflow. Creators using ThinkFree Office can offer certain rights to…

We have a new Featured Commoner — an interview with Michela Ledwidge of MODfilms by one of our Summer ’06 interns, Amy Rose. MODfilms produces “remixable” film content and technology aimed at new cinema platforms and is currently working on a film called “Sanctuary,” which will be released to the public under a CC BY-NC-SA…

As we all know, Creative Commons offers free license and tech tools to the creators for them to use to clearly signal to the public that some uses are permitted. But CC is also about more than just the actual licenses and tools — CC and the issues it raises and touches on engenders debate.…

The Foundation Center’s Philanthropy News Digest has published a nice item on Creative Commons as this week’s On the Web profile. Check it out for a very clear and concise introduction to CC.

I’m heading to Portland, Oregon for O’Reilly Media’s Open Source Convention (OSCON) tomorrow. I’ll be presenting an updated and expanded version of my PyCon talk on Building Extensible Desktop Applications with Zope 3. The more I work with it, the more I realize that a better title would be Loosely Coupled, Component Based Development with…

Wikimania Awards will be given for free content in several categories at Wikimania, entries due August 1st. Side note: Wikimedia Commons has an excellent collection of content under liberal CC licenses. See our list of content curators. Thanks to Elizabeth Stark of FreeCulture.org for pointing out the Wikimania Awards. French Linux software company Mandriva has…

Canadian author MCM has created a kid’s storybook and fable for the commons: The Pig and the Box is about a pig who finds a magic box that can replicate anything you put into it. The pig becomes so protective of it, and so suspicious of anyone that wants to use it, that he makes…

MOD Films produces “remixable” film content and technology aimed at new cinema platforms. Through documentation and packaging of the film production, MOD helps to support future use of the films as digital video releases, in games, and as source material for online communities to play with. Michela Ledwidge founded MOD Films in 2004 with a…