Creative Commons licenses help creators (and users) opt for reasonable copyright by offering (and using) creative works under “some rights reserved” terms, expanding the commons where the default is “all rights reserved”. We also offer tools to mark works that are in the public domain — and are working on a major upgrade of those…

Science Commons Counsel Thinh Nguyen has posted a response to a recently released statement by STM (the trade association for scientific, technology and medical publishers) on author addenda. This is an issue near and dear to our hearts, due to our Scholar’s Copyright work. Here’s an excerpt: “[…] [STM] recently released a statement this March…

An update on Nine Inch Nails’ new CC-licensed album, Ghosts I-IV. Today, NIN’s Trent Reznor announced the launch of the Ghosts Film Festival project on YouTube. Reznor describes it as an “expansion of the Ghosts project into the visual world.” The concept is for you to take whatever tracks you feel inspired by from Ghosts…

The cool new video for Spoon‘s “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb” was co-created by Ryan Junell – who you may know from his work on CC’s popular “Get Creative,” “Reticulum Rex,” and “Wanna Work Together?” clips, as well as for designing the Creative Commons logo. Check out some CC-licensed behind-the-scenes stills from the production on…

Freesound is a repository of CC-licensed audio samples … nearly 50,000 sounds. In December Freesound received a Google Research Award which they’re using to create “Freesound 2.0”. You can follow progress on their development blog and discuss on their forum. I interviewed Freesound founder Bram de Jong a couple years ago.

rstevens (the r is for Richard), creator of popular webcomic Diesel Sweeties, announced on his blog that starting today he will be releasing the entire Diesel Sweeties archive for free under a CC BY-NC license. The archive contains close to 2,000 web comics, offering massive potential for to interesting reuses (via Boing Boing): By my…

The second COMMUNIA workshop, Ethical Public Domain: Debate of Questionable Practices, will take place on Monday, March 31 in the geographic center of Europe: Vilnius, Lithuania. The workshop will host ten rounds of debates on issues concerning to the public domain and related policies and practices, followed by a press conference inviting the media and…

On May 28-30, The Center for Intellectual Property at the University of Maryland University College will be hosting a symposium focused on U.S. copyright monopoly, technological innovation and higher education institutions titled “Monopoly: Playing the Innovation Game”. The symposium will take place at the UMUC Inn and Conference Center in metro Washington D.C. Tied into…

CEO of Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig along with VP of Science Commons, John Wilbanks, and myself, Jon Phillips holder of the title of the “human inbox” of Creative Commons [1] will all be participating at the 1st International Creative Commons Korea conference, “Open Culture in CC” on Friday, March 14 in Seoul, Korea. Lessig will…

OpenMoko, makers of the first true open source phone (previously blogged here), have recently expanded the meaning of ‘open source design’ by licensing the CAD (computer-aided design) files for their flagship model, the Neo1973, under a CC BY-SA license. In doing so, OpenMoko not only allow industrial designers a peek inside the Neo1973 to see…