San Francisco, CA, USA — April 1, 2008 Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that works to expand the body of creative work available to the public for legal sharing and use, today announced both a leadership evolution and a major new grant of $4 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to support its…

Announced on ccMixterblog: MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., (March 31, 2008) – Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today that it has completed its acquisition of ccMixter.org , a company that offers online music management and technology which acquires personal information for advertisers, web publishers and ad agencies. Read the whole releaseApril Fools’ Day joke. In case you…

If you delayed applying to Summer of Code this year, you’re in luck — Google has revised the timeline. Student applications are now due by Tuesday, April 8, 2008 at 0:00 UTC. If you have an idea for a Creative Commons related project, feel free to ask for feedback on IRC or the cc-devel email…

Heads up to all Bay Area CC-ers – next Monday, April 7th from 7PM to 8:30PM, Independent Arts & Media will be hosting a panel titled “Sampling & Fair Use”: Copyright Issues For Indie Producers. Our own Jennifer Yip will be on hand to discuss CC licenses and how to access open works online. Joining…

Proto-lawyer, GNOME hacker and CC friend Luis Villa’s brief “CC-licensed specification” rant is correct: [I]mplementing a spec may require (among other things) licensing of “pending utility and design patent claims, copyrights, trade dress and trademark rights.” Putting a specification under a CC license gives you a copyright license to the text of the specification; it…

Back in December, we blogged about Lingro, a project that aims “to create an on-line environment that allows anyone learning a language to quickly look up and learn the vocabulary most important to them”. Lingro pools the open-content community for their definitions (including CC BY-SA licensed user submissions), ingraining it in a cycle of sharing…

FUSE! is a Thai creative platform that aims to connect filmmakers, musicians, photographers, and other creative individuals in one space while encouraging reuses of each other’s work. All content is released under a CC BY-NC-SA license, making the sharing and reuse of these works not only encouraged but legally sound. The best works are published…

Jamglue are up to their old tricks, this time holding a “Best of Jamglue” contest to find the best rappers in their community. While the due-date to enter has passed, voting continues until this Sunday (3/30) so get over there, listen to some CC BY licensed entries, and get voting! You can read more about…

We are pleased to announce a brand new Press Kit page. Based on user requests and feedback, we have completely redesigned it to make it easier for you to find and use specific CC graphics. As before, all graphics are available in various formats for any purpose, including large format transparent PNGs — which work…

Great news from the OLPC project – 8.5 GB worth of sound library samples have been donated to the project by the Berklee College of Music, Berklee Music Synthesis alumni (including electronic musician BT and the international Csound Developer community), M-Audio, Digidesign, and the Open Path Music group! The samples are being released under a…