's News

The Power of Open: over 400 million CC-licensed works, with increasing freedom

The Power of Open, released last week, demonstrates the impact of Creative Commons through stories of successful use of our tools by artists, educators, scientists, and institutions of all types. The book also features two pages sketching the socio-economic value (separately, we’re looking at this in-depth; follow these posts) and numerical adoption of CC tools. … Read More “The Power of Open: over 400 million CC-licensed works, with increasing freedom”

Open Knowledge Conference 2011

The Open Knowledge Foundation’s annual conference, OKCon, is next week in Berlin. They’ve put together an amazing program featuring some of the most exciting projects and speakers in the free/libre/open universe beyond software — though free software is not unrepresented — Richard Stallman is giving what should be an extremely interesting talk on Free/Libre Software … Read More “Open Knowledge Conference 2011”

DRM (a day against)

Today is a good day to learn about Digital Rights Management, or more accurately Digital Restrictions Management: Selection of blog posts from Day Against DRM 2011 Posts on the Creative Commons blog about DRM, going back to 2004. DRM article on English Wikipedia Although DRM seems to no longer be the red hot issue it … Read More “DRM (a day against)”

Firefox 4

Firefox 4 is officially released today by our friends at Mozilla, and it is awesome. Install or upgrade now. In large part due to Mozilla’s leadership over the years, the Open Web is in good health. Open standards and open formats are becoming the norm. This means anyone, anywhere can develop innovative applications that will … Read More “Firefox 4”

New copyright-like rights considered harmful

Today a new German site launched, IGEL (“Initiative gegen ein Leistungsschutzrecht”; in English, “initiative against a related right”). The site, spearheaded by German lawyer Till Kreutzer, provides information on a possible proposal for a new “related right” for press publishers. Original content on the site is released under the Creative Commons Attribution license. Additionally, Creative … Read More “New copyright-like rights considered harmful”

On CBC podcasts and CC-licensed music available for commercial use

On Friday, Michael Geist broke the story that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had apparently banned use of CC-licensed music in its podcasts. This seemed odd, given that the CBC’s Spark podcast has long used, promoted, and done interesting projects with CC-licensed music. It is always gratifying to see CC supporters (superheroes even!) quickly respond — … Read More “On CBC podcasts and CC-licensed music available for commercial use”