As of yesterday GRDDL, pronounced “griddle”, is a World Wide Web Consortium recommendation. GRDDL allows one to describe in a standard way how to map information between different XML formats. The acronym stands for “Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages”, which describes exactly what the standard facilitates. This is important to Creative Commons because…

The Computer and Communications Industry Association has released a study claiming that the value added in the United States by industries dependent on fair use is $2.2 trillion dollars annually, or one sixth of the U.S. economy, apparently almost 70% more than than value added by copyright industries, as measured by other recent studies. From…

Creative Commons is working with Helsinki Institute for Information Technology to create Finland jurisdiction-specific licenses from the generic Creative Commons licenses. CCi Finland List Project Lead: Herkko Hietanen, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology. License draft. English explanation of substantive legal changes. Post a message. Subscribe to the discussion. Read the discussion archives. More about the…

An Untapped SEO Opportunity: Image Link Love From Wikipedia suggests that web marketers should license their images under CC Attribution-ShareAlike and contribute them to Wikimedia Commons for use on Wikipedia sites. I like this advice for the obvious reason (encouraging CC licensing, especially under a liberal CC license), but the remarkable thing is that following…

A late report on Bandwidth 2007, “The “Music | Technology Conference” held in San Francisco August 17-18. I moderated “The DRM Panel”, retitled from “Mano-A-Mano: The DRM Panel”, as it seemed the panelists would largely be in agreement. This was the case. None of the panelists were tied to a hard-core anti-DRM position or a…

A couple weeks old, but worth reading: Cory Doctorow excoriates Science Fiction Writers of America for issuing takedowns on his behalf, without his permission, against sites hosting his books, with permission (under CC licenses). Meanwhile, Cory blogs about another author’s science fantasy trilogy released under a CC license and is writing a column in Locus…

Intentionally controversial (and funny) pointed out by Techdirt: However, as Bob Lefsetz points out, McCartney’s album looks like it’s a money loser for Starbucks — though McCartney likely made money from Starbucks who probably paid him a nice sum to put the album out on the new label. However, as Lefsetz points out, he could…

Behold is a phenomenal resource that “attempts to catalogue CC images with quality comparable to that of professional image archives such as Getty Images or Corbis, by using the social structure of Flickr and image content analysis”. The ultimate aim of Behold is to offer graphic designers and artists access to high quality images that…

From the Science Commons blog … Now up on MIT World, “Copyright, Fair Use, and the Cultural Commons.” The Web cast is from the April 28, 2007 panel discussion featuring Creative Commons‘ own Hal Abelson, William Uricchio (who moderated the event), Wendy Gordon, Gordon Quinn, and Pat Aufderheide. From the Web site: “Moderator William Uricchio…

At this weekend’s Singularity Summit in San Francisco, “openness” of all sorts — open source, open access, open content, transparency — seems to be considered an uncontroversial and important part of making “AI and the future of humanity” a good one, for example: If the singularity is in fact near, the fundamental tools of information,…