In the world of weblogs, we’ve noticed a couple notable recent adopters of Creative Commons licenses. Jon Johansen, the teenage hacker that famously cracked DVD encryption so he could watch a movie he purchased on his computer, started a blog called “So Sue Me.” He was recently acquitted of charges he did anything wrong. A…
Mike Meyers, star of the popular Austin Powers series, has just scored an unusual movie deal with Dreamworks that will allow him to make films from sampling earlier movies. DreamWorks will acquire the necessary rights so the actor can be digitally inserted in the old flicks. Today, people practicing in music and movie “mash-ups” are…
As we reported last month when it was first announced, the new version of Movable Type, a popular application for managing weblogs, was released today with full support for adding a Creative Commons license to your website. If you have a weblog, or are thinking about starting one, you might want to check out the…
“Some Rights Reserved,” by Gary Stix
In a story about the U.S. Homeland Security office’s recent suggestion that American citizens apply plastic sheeting and duct tape to doors and windows in case of terrorist attack, CNNfn last night aired several scenes from “Duck and Cover,” a public domain film from 1951 that famously advised American school children to take shelter beneath…
There’s a great piece about Creative Commons in the March issue of Scientific American. You may remember that Scientific American recently named our chairman Lawrence Lessig one of the 50 top innovators of 2002.
MusicBrainz, one of our collaborators, has announced they’re releasing their database of music metadata under a CC license. MusicBrainz metadata lets you take all your assorted music files and organize them with consistent title, author, and album information.
Free trading of our music has genuine, verifiable returns. Community. Exchanges of artistic thought and aesthetic commodity. . . The RIAA argument that artists won’t particpate in the marketplace of ideas without financial compensation for CDs seems pretty short-sighted from where we sit. — Chris Wetherell, Dealership We recently sat down for an interview with…
Technorati is an interesting weblog data mining tool that tracks links among and between sites. During its recent overhaul, creator Dave Sifry added a Creative Commons license to the resulting indexes and feeds. This allows others to reprint and produce modified versions of the indexes, as long as they are not used for commercial purposes…
There’s been a lot of recent talk among weblogs regarding Creative Commons licenses. After a little healthy back-and-froth, Copyfight cleared up some confusion over its use of a Creative Commons license. Doc (whom we profiled on this site) recently changed his blog to devote the contents to the public domain, sparking a discussion among a…