The developers of the amaroK media player for KDE have used the tracks from the WIRED CD as content for their demo Live CD. Boot the CD in a PC and you can try out armaroK with zero installation. Great idea. USB memory and hardware media player vendors take note — you can ship your…

Carlos Sánchez Almeida, a Spanish abogado and fellow Creative Commons proselytizer, has published an English translation of his talk ‘Carta a Hipatia’, originally delivered by him at the Spanish launch event at the University of Barcelona in October 2004. The paper can be found here. Thanks to all involved in the translation effort and to…

The final winners of the Freestyle Mix, and the Milita Mix contests have been announced on Mixter. The top eleven Freestyle Mix entries have won a spot on the Creative Commons release, The WIRED CD — Ripped. Sampled. Mashed. Shared. (playing off the original WIRED CD), and free passes to the M3 Music Summit in…

Wunderkind novelist Jonathan Safran Foer and badboy British artist Damien Hirst make unrelated appearances in this week’s New York Times magazine. Unrelated, but for this nice coincidence in how the Net has affected each artist’s craft. From the Jonathan Safran Foer profile: Full-page photographs, all in arty black-and-white, are woven into the narrative, and typography…

Last week we mentioned there were over 5 million web pages linking to Creative Commons licenses. This week, it has come to our attention that Yahoo! has updated their index to find well over 10 million web pages that link to our licenses. If you’re curious at all to see what licenses people are choosing,…

At the end of 2003, we were proud to announce that over 1 million web pages had linked to Creative Commons licenses. Today, we are even more proud to say that this number is now well over 5 million web pages. Thanks to you, a vibrant base of free culture is flourishing.

The Microsoft-hosted PatternShare community brings together information on software patterns organized by wiki inventor and now Microsoft employee Ward Cunningham. PatternShare uses the liberal Creative Commons Attribution License. Thanks Ward Cunningham and thanks Microsoft! Although it predates the availability of Creative Commons licensing by many years, I would be remiss to not recommend Cunningham’s still…

The Florida chapter of Free Culture made their presence known at the University of Florida Law School’s Music Law Conference. They wrote about the experience here on their blog, and also made a remarkable visual display which can only speak for itself. The photos were taken by Gavin Baker:

The Fine Art of Sampling Contest has drawn to a close and we’re fortunate enough to have great judges picking the winners. For the Freestyle Mix, WIRED music editors and contributors Eric Steuer, Philip Sherburne, Adrienne Day, Hua Hsu, and Geeta Dayal will be making the final call. For the Militia Mix, Brian Hardgroove of…

While not Creative Commons licensed, we were gratified to hear that a web-only release from Maria Schneider won a Grammy at the recent awards, despite the fact that her CD was only available from ArtistsDirect, and not in any record store. Reuters has a good wrapup and it’s our hope this is the first of…