Just a quick note to say I just downloaded your MP3 from the harvard.edu site. It’s good to know that my music was good enough to be included in your report. I enjoy fact that other people can appreciate it and use it freely in their own work. Regards, Laurie Laptop My friend Benjamen Walker…

This week’s featured content is the ebook Just In Tokyo. It’s a offbeat guidebook to Tokyo written by web veteran Justin Hall and is now available for download under a Creative Commons license. First printed a few years go, it’s now out of print and Justin is asking for voluntary donations if you like the…

Creative Commons’ Assistant Director, Neeru Paharia will be on a panel titled Music in the Digital Era this Thursday at the UC Davis School of Law. The panel, cosponsored by the Entertainment and Sports Law Society and California Lawyers for the Arts, will focus on the effects of digital mediums and internet downloading on the…

Creative Commons and GLOCOM release official Japanese copyright licenses for iCommons Japan, the first country-specific adaptation of the open content system. Palo Alto, USA, and Tokyo, Japan – Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to building a body of creative works free for copying and re-use, and GLOCOM, its Japanese affiliate, today announced the official roll…

I am very happy to announce that our Japanese-law and -language licenses are now available for use from our site. Just select “Jurisdiction: Japan” when choosing a license, and the site will point you to the right document. For those with browsers set to English, the Commons Deed will appear in English. For those with…

Ben Adida, one of our tech advisors, will attend the Semantic Web portion of the World Wide Web Consortium Plenary Session this Thursday and Friday in Cannes, France. RDF, the technology we chose 18 months ago to build our machine-readable licenses, recently became a finalized W3C recommendation.

Today we announce a search engine prototype exclusively for finding Creative Commons licensed and public domain works on the web. Indexing only pages with valid Creative Commons metadata allows the search engine to display a visual indicator of the conditions under which works may be used as well as offer the option to limit results…

We’re happy to announce the winners in our GET CREATIVE!: Moving Images Contest. Last fall, we asked aspiring filmmakers and flash artists to create a short film that explained the mission of the Creative Commons. Our panel of judges has selected the top three entries and they’re all terrific. We want to thank everyone that…

The New York Times today reports on a surreal U.S. Treasury Department Policy: Anyone who publishes material from a country under a trade embargo is forbidden to reorder paragraphs or sentences, correct syntax or grammar, or replace “inappropriate words,” according to several advisory letters from the Treasury Department in recent months. Adding illustrations is prohibited,…

“Copyright Enters a Grey Area,” by Noah Shachtman.