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…

Interesting to see more worldwide uptake: Karl-Friedrich Lenz is publishing several legal books (in German) under a Creative Commons License, while Swedish open source community site Gnuheter does the same.

Gamelan Nyai Saraswati, a group of Gamelan musicians from central Java playing in North Carolina, offer recordings from their performances under a Creative Commons license. More about the ensemble and their music is available on their site.

In Japan, a project called the “Intellectual Property Outline” started in July 2002 and includes some provisions that seek to accomplish many of the same goals as the Creative Commons. While it is clear they were not influenced by us directly, it’s interesting to watch the convergence of alternate forms of copyright come from governments…

Shanghaiphotos.com is a site devoted to the city of Shanghai run by an avid hobbyist photographer. It also happens to be the first website based in China (that we know of) to use Creative Commons licenses for its content.