Techdirt’s Mike Masnick gave a great case study lecture on Nine Inch Nails’ music business successes at MidemNet last month. He describes the “formula” as: Connect With Fans (CwF) + Reason To Buy (RtB) = The Business Model ($$$$) Toward the end of the video he explains CwF also means “Compete with Free” and RtB…

Following up the success of Wikis Take Manhattan, a new project, Wikipedia Loves Art is launching this weekend: Wikipedia Loves Art is a scavenger hunt and free content photography contest among museums and cultural institutions worldwide, and aimed at illustrating Wikipedia articles. The event is planned to run for the whole month of February 2009.…

More than a year ago, Free Culture advocate Anas Tawileh analyzed the state of Arabic content online. His portal Arab Commons has grown modestly but steadily since its launch in 2007, offering 11 full textbooks in Arabic, plus magazines, podcasts, poetry collections, and a number of art works — all within a few months. For…

If you’re like me, you probably never even heard of the TED conference until TED Talks launched online (in April of 2007). TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design” and their talks are given annually at the TED conference in Long Beach, CA. 50 speakers give “talks” or 18 minute speeches about a variety of issues,…

We’re at a very exciting time in the life of CC. We had a great year last year, and as you’ll read in this newsletter, CC is poised for even more growth and success in 2009 — in the realms of education, science, culture, internationally, and more. February also marks the one-year anniversary since the…

The winners of last year’s Sparky Awards are now officially up online (see today’s press release). The Sparky Awards is “a contest organized by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and adopted by campuses nationwide that calls on entrants to creatively illustrate in a short video the value of sharing ideas.” The student…

CC Colombia has proudly announced their first CC Salon will be held in Bogotá! The guests accompanying the program come from different backgrounds (film, music, and the web), but with a common purpose: to share content. Speaking at the event: Diego Ramirez: Marketing for Dynamo Capital Andrés Succar: Director of Banda Calambuco Claudio Ruiz: President…

CC Colombia has proudly announced their first CC Salon will be held in Bogotá! The guests accompanying the program come from different backgrounds (film, music, and the web), but with a common purpose: to share content. Speaking at the event: Diego Ramirez: Marketing for Dynamo Capital Andrés Succar: Director of Banda Calambuco Claudio Ruiz: President…

The latest Beyond The Book podcast (mp3) features an interview with CC staff Mike Linksvayer and Melissa Reeder. The two main themes discussed are the intersection of public sharing under CC licenses and alternative private arrangements (see our post on Ozmo, a service that enables both, discussed on the podcast) and the upcoming UGCX conference.…

Koblo is a new online music collaboration site that utilizes CC licensing on tracks and song stems to promote community remixing and reuse. Uniquely, Koblo exists beyond the web in the form of Koblo Studio, a free and opensource software DAW that has the ability to upload projects to Koblo’s community site with all the…