At the end of 2003, we were proud to announce that over 1 million web pages had linked to Creative Commons licenses. Today, we are even more proud to say that this number is now well over 5 million web pages. Thanks to you, a vibrant base of free culture is flourishing.

The Microsoft-hosted PatternShare community brings together information on software patterns organized by wiki inventor and now Microsoft employee Ward Cunningham. PatternShare uses the liberal Creative Commons Attribution License. Thanks Ward Cunningham and thanks Microsoft! Although it predates the availability of Creative Commons licensing by many years, I would be remiss to not recommend Cunningham’s still…

The Florida chapter of Free Culture made their presence known at the University of Florida Law School’s Music Law Conference. They wrote about the experience here on their blog, and also made a remarkable visual display which can only speak for itself. The photos were taken by Gavin Baker:

The Fine Art of Sampling Contest has drawn to a close and we’re fortunate enough to have great judges picking the winners. For the Freestyle Mix, WIRED music editors and contributors Eric Steuer, Philip Sherburne, Adrienne Day, Hua Hsu, and Geeta Dayal will be making the final call. For the Militia Mix, Brian Hardgroove of…

While not Creative Commons licensed, we were gratified to hear that a web-only release from Maria Schneider won a Grammy at the recent awards, despite the fact that her CD was only available from ArtistsDirect, and not in any record store. Reuters has a good wrapup and it’s our hope this is the first of…

Over on our Mixter site, we’re nearing the closing date on the Fine Art of Sampling contests. Saturday, Feburary 12th is the last day to submit your entries into The Freestyle Mix contest pool and the Militia Mix pools. The top prize on the Freestyle Mix will be appearing on an upcoming mix CD released…

Marc Perkel is offering free spam filtering for progressive nonprofit organizations (more info here). Creative Commons has been using his service since last summer. I don’t get much spam delivered to my creativecommons.org inbox. Thanks Marc!

Scott Esposito noticed a short story, within a book of poetry, all on the copyright page of the book. An amusing tale of the entire history of a poem collection.

Engadget has a great tutorial about how to build a low-cost music and vocal recording studio using a new Apple mini, a few audio components, and some instruments. They include some step-by-step help working with Garageband as well. If you’ve been recording music at home with poor results or wanted a way to create your…

Last night Francesca and I went to see the artist Barbara Kruger speak at the San Francisco Art Institute. Kruger is known for, among other things, stark photo-and-text collages that appropriate the language of consumer culture to comment on it. After the talk, Francesca (our resident art expert) gave Kruger a Creative Commons t-shirt and…