This year’s Freedom to Creativity festival is underway in Zagreb, Croatia, featuring a lecture by John Wilbanks of Science Commons on “The Impact of Patents and Licensing on the Commons” and free culture performances by artists from Croatia and Serbia and Montenegro. Creative Commons licenses for Croatia were announced at last year’s festival. Happy one…

During last week’s Senate hearing on the Broadcast Flag, Senator Ted Stevens revealed that his daughter had recently bought him an iPod — and that he enjoys using it to listen to ripped CDs. In turn, IPac has launched a drive to collect money to buy iPods for other senators who work on technology legislation.…

The Soundclick music community passed the 200,000 mark for CC-licensed mp3s over the weekend. That’s a whole lot of music. Soundclick doesn’t offer CC-specific search or feeds, which rather points out an opportunity for aggregators. Forunately Google and Yahoo! have both indexed the Soundclick site rather well. Click on one of the previous links or…

Last summer, Creative Commons had the pleasure of having Fred Benenson as its first Free Culture intern. Fred was tasked with coming up with interesting or cool ways to get out Creative Commons’ message but on a grass roots level. Fred created a very sexy media kit that Free Culture members can give to bands…

As I procrastinatefinish my slides for a talk on Semantic Search on the Public Web with Creative Commons at the 2006 Semantic Technology Conference (March 6-9, San Jose, California) I note that the closing keynote makes some pretty heady predictions: Markets for semantic technology products and services will grow 10-fold from 2006 to 2010 to…

A few days ago we turned on a completely redesigned public wiki. The main content there now focuses on software developers. Shortly the entire technology section of the CC site will move to the wiki and will no longer be embarrassingly out of date. I want to especially draw attention to our technology challenges page.…

Although the CC Malaysia project was only launched in December 2005 and the Malaysian version of the CC licenses are slated for release in early March 2006, under the stewardship of project lead Dr. Ng Alina, the CC concept has received some welcome initial support in Malaysia. Several musicians have explained how Creative Commons licensing…

Monday evening I had the pleasure of presenting to the Purdue Linux User Group (PLUG) and Purdue Computing Society in West Lafayette, Indiana. Unlike previous talks I’ve done, this one wasn’t about a specific development I’m working on, but rather an overview of CC and metadata. In particular we had a good discussion about the…

Cool new global video contest from a community media center in Lowell, Massachusetts: the 100 Second Festival. The deadline for entry is May 1. Entries must be CC licensed and are available for download with Bittorrent. The winners will be screened in Lowell this summer. Yep, your submission must be 100 seconds or less. Got…

The first Black Sweater White Cat of the year is an all-Comfort Stand program — two hours featuring twenty Comfort Stand tracks and an extended interview with Otis Fodder and Mr. Melvis, two of the netlabel’s musician-operators. If you don’t want to hear about how great Creative Commons and the Internet Archive are, or be…