Last week, the Creative Commons licences were presented by Massimo Travostino at the Settimana delle liberta in Florence, Italy. The week-long conference also featured presentations by Richard Stallman of the FSF and Sergio Amadeu of the Brazilian Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia da Informação. The Italian mailing list – where the local draft licences are currently…

Il Forno is a baking weblog based in Germany that is licensed under Creative Commons. There are many recipes posted, especially in the bread making category and when you consider the way recipes are passed from one generation to the next, it would seem that Creative Commons licenses would be a natural for cooking communities…

In the first quarter of the current year, iCommons has made significant progress in porting the CC licences – based on US-copyright law – to other jurisdictions, thereby internationalizing the movement. By early April, three European countries (Germany, Croatia and the Netherlands) as well as Australia and Jordan had come up with the first drafts…

AGNULA Music Libre, a new database of libre music (which includes music licensed under the CC Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike licenses), launched last month. The site has adopted CC’s license embedding strategy, publishing RDF backing license claims made in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files.

iRATE radio has placed 3,000 CC-licensed tracks from the non-evil Magnatune label into “rotation.” iRATE is a collaborative filtering system for music. The first song new users have the opportunity to rate is Monsters from Magnatune artist Beth Quist. A future iRATE skin will include CC license indicators in the main display. Here’s a sneak…

Public discussion on the Creative Commons translation license starts this Monday (April 26). The translation license would be used by authors who want to make their works available for others to translate into local languages. The initial idea for the license came from a lecturer at a conference in South Africa in January this year.…

Andy Raskin wrote a long, detailed piece about Creative Commons for the May 2004 issue of Business 2.0 magazine entitled “Giving It Away (for Fun and Profit).” The thrust of the artice is a look at what the future landscape might look like for artists that license their work under Creative Commons. The article also…

Last week I gave a talk on the licences and their relationship to the public domain at the ATRIP Conference in Utrecht, Holland. ATRIP is the International Association for the Advancement of Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property. Abraham Drassinower of the University of Toronto Law School gave a fascinating paper dealing with CCH Canadian…

I delivered a talk on Creative Commons’s international efforts yesterday at the conference of European Cultural Heritage Online. The conference took place in the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. ECHO is an EU-funded collaborative research endeavour that provides support for scientific and cultural institutions in Europe that enrich cultural…

A recent study of people that download music from the internet found that 21% of the participants had also downloaded a feature film before. 9% had even downloaded a film in the past month. These are some fairly high numbers and point out that while everyone has been predicting what happened to music would eventually…