Ben Adida, one of our tech advisors, will attend the Semantic Web portion of the World Wide Web Consortium Plenary Session this Thursday and Friday in Cannes, France. RDF, the technology we chose 18 months ago to build our machine-readable licenses, recently became a finalized W3C recommendation.

Today we announce a search engine prototype exclusively for finding Creative Commons licensed and public domain works on the web. Indexing only pages with valid Creative Commons metadata allows the search engine to display a visual indicator of the conditions under which works may be used as well as offer the option to limit results…

We’re happy to announce the winners in our GET CREATIVE!: Moving Images Contest. Last fall, we asked aspiring filmmakers and flash artists to create a short film that explained the mission of the Creative Commons. Our panel of judges has selected the top three entries and they’re all terrific. We want to thank everyone that…

The New York Times today reports on a surreal U.S. Treasury Department Policy: Anyone who publishes material from a country under a trade embargo is forbidden to reorder paragraphs or sentences, correct syntax or grammar, or replace “inappropriate words,” according to several advisory letters from the Treasury Department in recent months. Adding illustrations is prohibited,…

“Copyright Enters a Grey Area,” by Noah Shachtman.

“Grey Album Fans Protest Clamdown,” by Katie Dean.

“Some Rights Reserved,” by Annalee Newitz.

Just a little over two weeks until South by Southwest, the wonderful tech-film-music conference in Austin, Texas, USA (my beloved hometown). If you’re in town, come check out our two panels on music (Sample, Share, or Both?) and film (Can Copyright Bring the Audience to the Director?) the morning of March 15. That night we’ll…

Annalee Newitz has a nice article in this week’s SF Bay Guardian about independent publishing and the some rights reserved copyright model.

Creative Commons has recently expanded the iCommons project further to include Croatian, Spanish, and Catalan drafts in progress. They join the other jurisdictions in the effort to port Creative Commons licenses to the framework of international law. Every country has an ongoing discussion so if you’re interested in helping bring the licenses to these places,…