Be The Media is a book for anyone looking to create, distribute, and engage with digital media. Compiled by David Mathison, the book features articles on how individuals are taking control of their own media production and distribution (Part One: The Personal Media Renaissance) and how communities are developing around these producers to showcase their…

The Creative Commons gratefully acknowledges support on behalf of Lulu.com in the form of a $50,000 annual five-year grant. The grant is from the Beal Fund of the Triangle Community Foundation. This substantial investment demonstrates Lulu’s commitment to participatory culture and we are particularly grateful for it. Lulu was founded in 2002 to empower creators…

The team behind To Shoot An Elephant, the award-winning CC Attribution-Share Alike CC Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike licensed documentary we learned about late last year, are organizing a global screening of the film for Jan 18th, 2010: From the To shoot an elephant team we are calling on any individual, group or collective to organise a screening…

THANK YOU to everyone who donated to our annual fundraising campaign, who bought swag from our online store, and who helped spread the word to friends and colleagues asking for their support of CC over the past three months. Thanks to you, we were able to meet and exceed our goal, raising a total of…

The University of Amsterdam will present CC founder Lawrence Lessig with an honorary doctorate for his scholarship in cyberlaw and his advocacy to design a standard for open content licenses, Creative Commons. Prof. Bernt Hugenholtz of the Institute for Information Law (IvIR) will confer the degree on Prof. Lessig this Friday, Jan. 8. The following…

Wikipedia also wrapped up a wildly successful fundraiser at the end of the year. See below for Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ thank you letter to the community, reproduced in full under CC BY-SA, the license Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites migrated to last June. Note “support our friends” at the end — it is a…

The First Annual World’s Fair Use Day (WFUD) will be held on Tuesday January 12, 2010 in Washington, D.C. (with events kicking off Monday night). WFUD is being organized by Public Knowledge, and will bring together a wide variety of individuals and groups interested in fair use, including artists, scholars, policymakers, entrepreneurs, media professionals, and consumer…

Creative Commons has been celebrating Public Domain Day – January 1st – for several years, alongside many others who are similarly passionate about the value of the public domain and the need to prevent its demise. Each year on this day, copyright protection expires for millions of creative works, allowing those works to be used, repurposed…

We launched our fifth year-end campaign on October 5 in a very difficult economic environment. Today, the final day of the year, the decade, and last scheduled day of the campaign, we surpassed our goal of raising $500,000. Three major contributions in the last 24 hours carried us over the top from our board member…

Digital Garage has just pledged $100,000 to support Creative Commons’ work in 2010. Digital Garage has been a key corporate funder of Creative Commons since 2006 and we’re thrilled to continue having their support. Digital Garage CEO Kaoru Hayashi explains their mission: Digital Garage was founded so we could contribute to the building of a…