This week, the Grammy Awards nominations were announced – and, for the first time, a Creative Commons-licensed track and album are on the list. Nine Inch Nails’ “34 Ghosts IV” is nominated for Best Rock Instrumental Performance, while the album that track appears on, Ghosts I-IV, is up for Best Boxed Or Special Limited Edition…

Former Wilco member Jay Bennett is an incredibly talented singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer who has just put out his fifth solo album, Whatever Happened I Apologize, as a free download under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. For the release, Bennett is working with Rock Proper, an online distributor of CC-licensed music. The company has…

One of the key benefits of becoming a Creative Commons Network member is the OpenID login feature. In this blog post, we’ll cover the basics of OpenID and why having a Creative Commons Network OpenID is particularly interesting to users who care about their privacy. We’ll also point out the risks of using OpenID and…

No plans for this evening? If you’re in the SF Bay Area, consider stopping by and hearing Lawrence Lessig give a reading from his latest book, REMIX, TONIGHT at 7PM at the Barnes & Noble in San Mateo. This will be a great time to meet the founder of Creative Commons and hear more about…

It is commonly known that students learn by doing—by practicing, rather than simply soaking in, the information that is taught them in the classroom. But it is also commonly known that anyone can obtain information; the internet is chock-full of the stuff; all one has to do is type in a few key words and hit…

A Byte Of Vim is a newly released e-book by Swaroop C H that guides users, new and old, through the Vim 7 text editor. Released under a CC BY-SA license, the e-book is not only legally ripe for reuse but also approved for free cultural works. Of particular note is A Byte of Vim‘s…

One of the best things about Creative Commons, the organization, is the passionate commitment of our entire board. In addition to volunteering thousands of hours over CC’s history, they’re responsible for the major donor fundraising that bootstrapped and sustains CC, but all of that goes on behind the scenes. For the past few years we’ve…

The official website of the Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov is now available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 Bulgarian license. Bulgaria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been releasing its material under the same license since 2006, but ordinarily, these websites would be under full copyright, explains CC Bulgaria Project Lead Veni Markovski. “Bulgaria has taken…

Regional collaborations are strengthening CC projects worldwide. Regular conferences and outreach, coordinated on a regional level by CC Project Leads, are bringing visibility to local initiatives and promoting the ideals of sharing and free culture worldwide. Previous meetings have yielded clearer strategies and collaborations, as demonstrated by the recent Latam Commons, the growing COMMUNIA network,…

One of the most exciting sub-movements within open education is the current revolution regarding the evolution of textbooks. Old-fashioned publishers would often (and still do) rack up prices to hundreds of dollars per textbook, but this business model is rapidly changing to favor vastly cheaper educational resources based on more open licensing policies. One driver…