San Francisco, CA — November 14, 2007 Today Creative Commons released an Add-in for OpenOffice.org which allows users to select and embed a Creative Commons license in documents. Based on work completed as part of the Google Summer of Code by Cassio Melo, the add-in supports Writer (word processing documents), Calc (spreadsheets) and Impress (presentations).…

Over the summer Creative Commons had the good fortune to participate in the Google Summer of Code. One of our students, Cassio Melo, worked on developing an add-in for OpenOffice.org, similar to the one that existed for Microsoft Office. Today I’m pleased to announce the fruits of Cassio’s efforts. We’re releasing a beta release of…

Claudio Ruiz from Creative Commons in Chile reports the inauguration of the Panda Punk Lab, a multimedia lab in Chillán City offering educational software running on an Ubuntu Linux operating system: ” Because the indemnification received by the violation of a Creative Commons license – the first case in Chile and Latin America – the…

WITNESS, an international human rights organization founded by pop musician Peter Gabriel, announced yesterday the launch of The Hub (Beta), a place for users to view and contribute human rights-related media – a potential “YouTube for Human Rights”. Of note to the CC-community is that The Hub’s users are “advised to publish contents under a…

San Francisco, CA — November 13, 2007 Today, Creative Commons launched its second annual CC Swag Photo Contest. The contest is an important component of the third annual Creative Commons fundraising campaign, which was launched on October 1. “It is not only vital that we meet our $500,000 goal for the fundraising campaign, it’s also…

Photo © Franz Patzig – CC BY Photo © yamabobobo – CC BY Last year we launched the inaugural annual CC swag photo contest as a way to promote support for CC. There were over 50 entries to last year’s competition, including this one by Franz Patzig, which I’m sure you’ve seen somewhere by now.…

In looking at CC success stories, we tend to focus on how CC licences have allowed new business models to grow or have helped facilitate new forms of artistic expression. While these are both incredibly important and, in their increasing abundance, popular implementations of what CC can provide, what sometimes gets lost in the shuffle…

River Rat Records, an independent record company based in North London, has adopted CC-licenses for all their releases based on the assumption that sharing of music should be allowed without fear of legal ramifications (as long as it stays non-commercial): Music has never been a purely personal experience (more often it’s a shared one), but…

If interested, check out this great video of a talk CC CEO Lawrence Lessig gave back in March 2007 at The Annual TED Conference entitled “How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law”. There are some sections that are bound to be familiar to those in the CC-community while there are others that are entirely…

The Hardyman, a short story (6,500 words) by Susannah Breslin, published under the CC Attribution license. Story inspired by Hardiman, the first attempt to build a powered exoskeleton in 1965, licensing inspired by Cory Doctorow’s recent HOWTO use CC licenses. Breslin writes: It’s the longest story I ever wrote. I thought about further restricting its…