Finland is the first country to take part in iCommons, our project to port the lawyer-readable versions of our licenses for use across the world. The Helsinki Institute for Information Technology has produced a first draft of the Finnish licenses and will lead the process from a public discussion list hosted on our site. The…

The Helsinki Institute for Information Technology Will Drive Public Discussion from the Silicon Valley Nonprofit’s Website Palo Alto, California, USA – Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to building a layer of reasonable copyright, announced today that it would begin development of Finnish versions of its copyright licenses as part of its ongoing International Commons (iCommons)…

The highlight reel from the first week of the Sampling License discussion: Sarah Brown raised concerns that the draft language wasn’t clear enough about the copyrightability of sample-derived works and what other rights the sampler enjoys in them. She suggested we address these issues more explicitly. Cathy Kirkman, however, explained why the license itself need…

The Silicon Valley Nonprofit Also Rolls Out New Model for Community Participation Palo Alto, California, USA – May 29, 2003 – Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to building a layer of reasonable copyright, announced today that it would begin development of the Sampling License, a copyright tool designed to let artists encourage the creative transformation…

Salon has a fun piece, “Pillaging the Cartoon Universe,” about the Cartoon Network’s “Birdman: Attorney at Law,” a show saturated with cameos by characters from classic cartoons and other pop culture artifacts. Two disappointing aspects to this piece: 1) the bulk of it is available only to Salon “premium” subscribers, and 2) author Scott Thill…

Austin and Palo Alto, USA — March 11, 2003 — Davis Guggenheim, a celebrated director and producer of both documentary and dramatic film and television, joined the board of directors of Creative Commons this week. “Davis brings a unique and invaluable perspective to our team,” said Lawrence Lessig, Chairman of Creative Commons and Professor of…

We’ve updated our list of O’Reilly book titles, adding 33 more titles that are set to be released under the Founders’ Copyright.

Today we’re starting a new feature on the Creative Commons weblog: the Featured Content of the Week. Each week, we’ll link to some interesting licensed content that we’ve found on the web. These can be single photographs, songs, movies, e-books, or even new weblogs. If you’ve got some interesting material you’d like to be considered…

Lund University in Sweden has recently launched the Directory of Open Access Journals featuring hundreds of peer-reviewed, scholarly journals from scientific and cultural communities. Their principal aim is to secure the right of “users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles.” Along with the searchable directory,…

We’ve just flipped the switch on a discussion area for public participation as part of our new project development process (image). We’re using mailing lists to facilitate the discussion of new license options, our International Commons project, and metadata strategies. We kicked off the new model today with development of a sampling license, with discussion…