Every year, Arts Engine produces the fantastic Media That Matters Film Festival. The festival awards and screens a dozen social justice shorts each year and then releases them for sale under our Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license on region-free unencrypted DVDs. This allows educators, fans, and audiences to arrange their own non-commercial screenings of the shorts and help…

All sorts of interesting things show up in our Twitter search feed, and yesterday we were thrilled to come across Cadyou via @sketchupshop. Cadyou is a community launched by Tom Moor in late 2008 whose goal is to create a resource of free, high quality files for everyone to use, available in the Public Domain…

Forgive me, but a picture (screen shot) is worth a thousand words (searches): Today, on Yahoo’s Search Blog, Polly Ng and Anuj Sahai announced the addition of CC license image filtering options to their image search and also explained why CC licenses are so important for finding images online: Finding a great image online elicits…

Last November, the Center for Social Media at AU released a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education, which followed on the heels of a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video. These guides were aimed at clearing up many of the urban myths surrounding copyright, especially when…

Congratulations to Jamendo: 20,000 albums? We can hardly believe it! Well, it seems like just a few months ago we were celebrating 10,000 albums published on jamendo and this weekend we passed the 20,000 album mark! Actually, it was 11 months ago to be precise. Look at it this way and you’ll understand why we’re the first to be impressed with…

Rounding out the week of some exciting CC announcements, we wanted to pass along news of Flickr’s use of our CC Zero waiver for their shapefile dataset. “What is a shapefile?” you may ask. Its a file containing shapes mathematically generated by the thousands of Flickr geotagged photos of particular neighborhoods, countries, and continents. The…

A couple of weeks ago ProPublica posted a note on their site asking their users to “steal” their stories: You can republish our articles and graphics for free, so long as you credit us, link to us, and don’t edit our material or sell it separately. Put in CC terms, the public-interest journalism non-profit has…

The Wikimedia Foundation board has approved the licensing changes voted on by the community of Wikipedia and its sister sites. The accompanying press release includes this quote from Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig: “Richard Stallman’s commitment to the cause of free culture has been an inspiration to us all. Assuring the interoperability of free culture…

Results of the WIkipedia community vote on licensing are now in: The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has proposed that the copyright licensing terms on the wikis operated by the WMF — including Wikipedia — be changed to include the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) license in addition to the current GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). This will…

And we’d like to not think of ourselves as blockheads, either. If you came across Mark Helprin’s bizarre Op-Ed from a couple of weeks ago, you might have caught the legendary novelist playing the guilt-by-association-game by arguing that we’re “antagonistic to the authorial right.” In fact its the “authorial right” that makes CC work —…