Congratulations to former Creative Commons General Counsel Mia Garlick, who has joined the Australian government to lead its digital economy initiatives: iTWire has learnt that Mia Garlick, an Australian lawyer who was most recently product counsel for YouTube, has been appointed to head the Australian Government’s drive for the digital economy future, as assistant secretary…

Last year you probably saw a video demo of Photosynth at TED, and forwarded and/or were forwarded the video many times (the video is even licensed under CC BY-NC-ND, like all TED videos). Lots of people forwarded it to me anyway — I apparently do something with computers 🙂 and Photosynth is computer technology anyone…

Exciting news from Indaba Music – alternative rock band Third Eye Blind have teamed up with the former Featured Commoner to offer fans of the band, and Indaba members, increased interaction with the band’s music and writing process. 3EB will posting unfinished song stems to the community site, allowing members to take the stems, reuse/remix…

There’s been a whole lot of press on open textbooks lately, in addition to my own posts on the Flexbook and the Student PIRGs’ recent report encouraging open source textbooks as the right model for digital textbooks (versus the limited e-books that commercial publishers currently offer). The difference in open source and commercial e-books is…

LA-based multi-instrumentalist and former Featured Commoner Monk Turner released his latest album, Love Story, a little under a week ago for free download on archive.org. The album is released under a CC BY-NC-ND license, making it his fifth album released in this vein, his second this year, and twentieth overall. From Monk Turner: I wasn’t…

This month, the American Society of Cell Biology’s iBioSeminars added twelve new seminars to its original repertoire of twenty. The new seminars explore in depth topics such as “Odorant and Pheromone Signaling” and “Telomeres, Aging, and Cancer.” If you didn’t know already, iBioSeminars is the ASCB’s web seminar series featuring world-class scientists’ “on-going research in…

Common Craft is a company that makes videos which are “short, simple and focused on making complex ideas easy to understand.” These videos range in topic – from Twitter to social bookmarking to electing the U.S. President – and are made using a technique Common Craft calls Paperworks, a whiteboard-and-paper format that they believe “is…

XMP is the format Creative Commons recommends for embedding metadata (such as licensing information) in most media file types. Frankly there isn’t much competition — embedded metadata is poorly supported, formats are balkanized, and nobody save Adobe (XMP’s developer) has had the willingness to work on a problem that can only be solved over many…

The Copyleft Festival 2008 kicked off yesterday in Arezzo, Italy (located in Tuscany) with a great looking lineup of speakers and events. From CF2K8: Four days full of debates, meetings, music and shows that speak about Copyleft and Creative Commons licences. From the 11th to the 15th of September, the city of Arezzo in Tuscany…

Blogger and Director of Content Development @ blip.tv, Eric Mortensen, does a fantastic job of curating high resolution Creative Commons licensed photos. He uses Flickr’s ‘Favorite‘ function in an innovative way — all the work he favorites gets pushed to a RSS feed that you can subscribe to. Here’s a clip of the gallery he’s…