Legal ports to Brazilian law of Creative Commons 2.0 licenses are now live. Commoners Glenn Otis Brown and Neeru Paharia are at Software Livre 2004 in Porto Alegre for the launch celebration. Chairman Lawrence Lessig will arrive later this week for the official announcement, which will be led by Brazilian Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil.…

The BBC recently announced they’ll be opening up their archive and applying Creative Commons licenses to the works. A group of interested folks have started a list to talk about the release and produced a petition to support the decision.

Creative Commons is one of this month’s features on the Ibiblio home page. Ibiblio hosts Creative Commons’ movies and mailing lists, among many other resources. “The public’s library and digital archive” lives up to its tagline. Browse their virtual stacks.

Upgrading to one of our version 2.0 licenses or selecting one for the first time? Consider providing optional metadata about your work via the choose license process. Specifying a format will help people find your work via format-specific searches (e.g., a picture of the Eiffel Tower). If your work is derived from another, you might…

CC staff favorite and Magnatune artist, Brad Sucks recently started releasing the source to his most popular song, Making Me Nervous, and asking folks to contribute remixes. Like the Jim’s Big Ego remix project we’re got going on here (which can get your remix onto national radio), Brad’s now got six remixes (1, 2, 3,…

People from all around the world get together via a technology medium that allows them to form relationships through a global, far-flung community even though they have never met face to face. It may not be the first thing that comes to your mind, but amateur radio is alive and well thank you very much.…

Finland is the third country after the US and Japan to go ahead with their fully-fledged CC licences. After several months of legal deliberation the Finnish project lead Herkko Hietanen felt able to clear the licence draft and present it to the Finnish public last Monday, thus marking a major milestone in the development of…

The New York Times published an article about how the music industry influences song choice on American Idol today. I’ve long suspected that contestant song choice was limited to what the show could afford to pay in licensing costs ahead of time, since the choices of songs to cover seem limited. A producer of the…

Last night, after many months of gathering and processing great feedback from all of you, we turned on version 2.0 of the main Creative Commons licenses. The 2.0 licenses are very similar to the 1.0 licenses — in aim, in structure, and, by and large, in the text itself. We’ve included, however, a few key…

This Thursday’s Frontline on PBS is covering the modern music industry in an episode titled “The Way the Music Died“. It follows the industry rise after Woodstock in 1969, through music genre changes, and eventually how Napster and the Internet changed everything. It sounds interesting for musicians and music fans alike.