Public broadcasters often ask themselves: how to better enable tax payers to access the works that they have paid for? This was the question that the BBC, the public broadcaster for the United Kingdom, addressed in 2004 during the debate over its charter renewal. The result of their deliberations was a yearlong pilot, the Creative…

Today marks the release of Small Arm of Sea, the debut album by female indietronica singer, songwriter and producer Tone (Sofie Nielsen). While the album itself is unique in its style and substance, seamlessly combining abstract electronic composition techniques with a clear pop sensibility, it is equally as intriguing in terms of distribution. Small Arm…

Cory Doctorow has completed recording an audiobook version of Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. This important book captures the rise of the hacker subculture and documents the beginnings of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Doctorow spent the last year recording installments of the book, releasing incremental podcasts on his…

We are a bit late in posting this, but check out “Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video” from the Center for Social Media at American University. They argue that fair use is likely much larger than we imagine, specifically in relation to online video, and the clip real they put together makes…

In our most recent “Featured Commoner” piece, we catch up with musician Monk Turner, who experiments not only with a variety of musical styles but also distribution techniques, having released a slew of concept albums through the internet archive (all CC licensed). His most recent album, Monk Turner’s Calendar, came out this past week and…

In December we reported on the great news that MIT’s Open CourseWare initiative had released their 1,800th course, thereby publishing the entire MIT curriculum on OCW. MIT has now released comprehensive video recordings of the celebratory event, all published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. The keynote address was given by New York Times…

Lawrence Lessig, our CEO, just announced that his book The Future of Ideas is now licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. With this news, all of Lessig’s books are now freely licensed. Accolades to Random House, the publisher, for taking the brave and exciting step of sharing this work with the commons. Read more…

CC0 is a Creative Commons project designed to promote and protect the public domain by 1) enabling authors to easily waive their copyrights in particular works and to communicate that waiver to others, and 2) providing a means by which any person can assert that there are no copyrights in a particular work, in a…

With the help of Hubert Figuiere, Nathan Yergler, Peter Miller, Scott Shawcroft, and Jason Kivlighn, I’m happy to finally announce a new version of liblicense. Summary: Now this is really worth using. For those just joining us now, liblicense is a library to make it easy to add CC metadata support to desktop and server…

If you have access to educational science videos for kids (or if you even want to make your own), ccLearn encourages you to participate in the 2008 Science Video Collection and Remix Challenge! Check out the website for official details, but here’s the important stuff. Deadline is March 31, 2008. The grand prize includes: $2,000…