Keep an eye out for Creative Commons at the South By Southwest Music and Media Conference this March in Austin, Texas. We’ll be hosting two panels, announcing two projects that encourage collaboration and distribution of music and film. Details coming soon.

Never thought I’d say this, but the Super Bowl got me thinking. Why shouldn’t every advertiser release every print, audio, or multimedia ad they create under a Creative Commons license? Choose BY-NC-ND, and make clear you’re protecting your trademark. Forget the cultural effect — I’m talking pure business: What principle drives someone to enforce the…

Last month, Apple released Garageband at MacWorld, letting any budding musician create music from its suite of sophisticated but simple audio tools. Given the potential for thousands of musicians recording new songs at home, we knew it was a great fit for Creative Commons and we’re very happy to see a new community has sprung…

Government documents supplied by Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Ron Suskind for his book, The Price of Loyalty, are now available online. The site makes use of the Creative Commons public domain mark. These documents, drawn from a collection of 19,000 files, are called “The Bush Files” and Suskind…

Once upon a time, Apple’s slogan “Rip. Mix. Burn.” meant “make as many copies as you want of your legally purchased music.” Now it means “make the limited number of copies we deem appropriate.” All that’s being ripped, mixed, and burned are fair-use laws Annalee Newitz writes about the current state of P2P and DRM…

Fading Ways Music, an indie record label based out of Toronto, announced their 2004 releases will be sold under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike licenses. Fading Ways Music is the first internationally-distributed label to adopt Creative Commons licensing for its new physical CD releases. Fading Ways articulates its philosophy for open-licenses nicely on its mission page. Neil…

Cory Doctorow, author of the acclaimed sci-fi book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, has a new novel out in stores called Eastern Standard Tribe. Like Down and Out, it is both available for purchase as well as for free download, under a Creative Commons license.

Creative Commons will be an exhibitor at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego next week. Etech is regarded by many as the best tech conference of the year, always in step with the latest creations and aspirations of the alpha geeks, having evolved from the Peer-to-Peer Conference in early 2001 and P2P &…

Victor Stone writes a remixer-readable description on how the new Creative Commons Sampling license compares to our standard licenses. He also mentions that it’s important to have format specific metdata, so that search engines can find Creative Commons licensed audio, as opposed to text, images, or video. This way remixers can easily find sounds they…

iRATE Radio, an open-source application that sends users free-legal MP3s through its radio client, is now able to read the ID3 tags of MP3 files to identify Creative Commons license information. Enabling this kind of feature is exactly why Creative Commons put forth its MP3 embedding strategy many months ago, which defines a standard way…