The New York Times has a great story about the painful process a college professor went through to clear the rights for a short, informative video to be given to incoming students: “It’s crazy,” Professor Turow said of the labyrinth of permissions, waivers and fees he navigated to get the roughly three minutes of video…

Downhill Battle and p2pnet have announced a new video contest. The goal is to encourage people to make short movies and animations about the music industry, filesharing, and the potential we have to change the system. The right video can be the best way to explain these issues and get someone involved, and as always…

Several months ago, Apple released the music software Garageband, allowing anyone with a mac to make some music. Soon after the release, community websites sprang up to allow Garageband users to share music with each other, and build songs together. This is a perfect use for Creative Commons licenses, and earlier we noted that the…

“New copyright grants artists greater license” by Jennifer L. Schenker

The writings of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg may be amongst the most important in the 20th Century but it’s the sound of Burroughs’ growl and the haunting lilt in Ginsberg’s recitals that have compelled turntablists to use samples of their speaking voices. Sampling pioneers and Ninjatune entrepreneurs Jonathan More and Matt Black (a.k.a.…

We’ve recently flipped the switch on German Creative Commons licenses. Like the recent Brazil, Finland, and Japan licenses, in addition to the rewritten legal code that is now based on German law, the license interface is now available in German, as well as the licenses themselves. Thanks goes out to the folks at both The…

Creative Commons, a non-profit organization seeking to promote the sharing of high-quality content, today introduced its highly innovative licensing system for copyrighted material to Germany. Palo Alto, USA, and Berlin, GERMANY. Creative Commons, a non-profit organization seeking to promote the sharing of high-quality content, today introduced its highly innovative licensing system for copyrighted digital material…

Following many requests on cc-licenses for a list with a more general charter, we’ve created cc-community. If you have a burning question or discussion point related to Creative Commons that doesn’t seem to fit the specific description of any of our many discussion lists, hold back no longer. Subscribe to cc-community. Read the cc-community archives.…

One of the kings of scientific publishing, the journal Nature, has recently launched a forum to bring together articles and information about open access publishing. They’ve even got an RSS feed for updates to the forum. It’s great to see a top journal open a dialogue about a somewhat controversial issue in the scientific publishing…

Cabinet minister by day, mover of souls by night. At total ease bouncing from baritone to falsetto and back again. As nimble on stage as those half his age. Master of a crowd and, in person, friendly as can be. Gold-selling and Creative Commons-adopting. Is Gilberto Gil the world’s coolest man? Minister Gil with assistant…