Fading Ways Music, an indie record label based out of Toronto, announced their 2004 releases will be sold under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike licenses. Fading Ways Music is the first internationally-distributed label to adopt Creative Commons licensing for its new physical CD releases. Fading Ways articulates its philosophy for open-licenses nicely on its mission page. Neil…

Cory Doctorow, author of the acclaimed sci-fi book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, has a new novel out in stores called Eastern Standard Tribe. Like Down and Out, it is both available for purchase as well as for free download, under a Creative Commons license.

Creative Commons will be an exhibitor at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego next week. Etech is regarded by many as the best tech conference of the year, always in step with the latest creations and aspirations of the alpha geeks, having evolved from the Peer-to-Peer Conference in early 2001 and P2P &…

Victor Stone writes a remixer-readable description on how the new Creative Commons Sampling license compares to our standard licenses. He also mentions that it’s important to have format specific metdata, so that search engines can find Creative Commons licensed audio, as opposed to text, images, or video. This way remixers can easily find sounds they…

iRATE Radio, an open-source application that sends users free-legal MP3s through its radio client, is now able to read the ID3 tags of MP3 files to identify Creative Commons license information. Enabling this kind of feature is exactly why Creative Commons put forth its MP3 embedding strategy many months ago, which defines a standard way…

Linux Journal has a great interview with John Buckman from Magnatune, the non-evil record label that sells Creative Commons licensed music on a sliding scale. It’s turning out to be lucrative for the artists involved, with the average musician taking in $1,500 in royaltes last year and the top artists making over $6,000 in royalties…

So nice to see our tagline continue to catch on. There’s a nice profile of Creative Commons in the InfoTech section of the Singaporean news outlet Today. It’s entitled “Some Rights Reserved.”

This week’s featured content is Electrobel, a massive music community site for Belgian electronic music of all genres. There are over 2000 Creative Commons licensed tracks available for streaming and downloading. The site has an impressive array of features as well. Check out music by genre, by artist, or by song (the little diskette icon…

There’s a nice piece in the NYTimes about the increased levels of public participation in recent Mars landings. A big part of the reason is that given a large, interested population with broadband connections, NASA officials have done their best to share every bit of data, image, and video they can online, and as a…

An interesting contest has just opened for entries, called Fusedspace. “An international design competition on innovative applications for new technology in the public domain” is how they describe themselves but keep in mind the term “public domain” in this case is more specific to public spaces. The contest is set to give away over 17…