portishead @ atp, obo-bobolina | CC BY-NC Portishead, an experimental-pop group and pioneers of the early 90s electronica movement, announced yesterday that they are now “free agents”, having completed their three record deal with Island Records. The band is looking at new ways to sell their music and are reaching out to their fans for…

From CC Australia: A couple of days ago the [Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s] excellent collaborative media site, Pool, posted a recording of genetics professor Steve Jones talking about Darwin’s life and work under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial licence. As far as we’re aware, this is the very first time material from the ABC archives has been…

Herkko Hietanen, project lead for CC Finland, has made his 320 page dissertation available online under the CC BY-NC-ND license, titled The Pursuit of Efficient Copyright Licensing — How Some Rights Reserved Attempts to Solve the Problems of All Rights Reserved: The dissertation contributes to the existing literature in several ways. There is a wide…

YouTube just made an incredibly exciting announcement: it’s testing an option that gives video owners the ability to allow downloads and share their work under Creative Commons licenses. The test is being launched with a handful of partners, including Stanford, Duke, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UCTV. We are always looking for ways to make it…

Miro, the free and open source video player launched their 2.0 version today. The update has tons of new features that will help you explore video on the web, including YouTube HD, Hulu and the like. Dean writes on the Miro blog about the new chrome on 2.0: A beautiful, all-new widget based interface Browse…

We mentioned late last year that Jeremy Keith’s CC BY licensed photo was used in the film Iron Man. While that was particularly notable, Jeremy is a prolific user of CC licenses for his photos and other materials, garnering many reuses. A graphic design student asked him a series of 15 questions about CC. He…

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick gave a great case study lecture on Nine Inch Nails’ music business successes at MidemNet last month. He describes the “formula” as: Connect With Fans (CwF) + Reason To Buy (RtB) = The Business Model ($$$$) Toward the end of the video he explains CwF also means “Compete with Free” and RtB…

Following up the success of Wikis Take Manhattan, a new project, Wikipedia Loves Art is launching this weekend: Wikipedia Loves Art is a scavenger hunt and free content photography contest among museums and cultural institutions worldwide, and aimed at illustrating Wikipedia articles. The event is planned to run for the whole month of February 2009.…

The latest Beyond The Book podcast (mp3) features an interview with CC staff Mike Linksvayer and Melissa Reeder. The two main themes discussed are the intersection of public sharing under CC licenses and alternative private arrangements (see our post on Ozmo, a service that enables both, discussed on the podcast) and the upcoming UGCX conference.…

Koblo is a new online music collaboration site that utilizes CC licensing on tracks and song stems to promote community remixing and reuse. Uniquely, Koblo exists beyond the web in the form of Koblo Studio, a free and opensource software DAW that has the ability to upload projects to Koblo’s community site with all the…