The Carina nebula by ESO | CC BY The European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO) is a group that “builds and operates a suite of the world’s most advanced ground-based astronomical telescopes.” With those telescopes they produce some absolutely amazing photographs and videos, all of which are released under a CC…

Kraftwerk by greenplastic875 | CC BY German electronic-music pioneers Kraftwerk were told yesterday by a judge in Germany that a two-second sample used by a producer in Germany did not infringe on their copyright. From the BBC (emphasis added): The ruling overturns an earlier decision against Moses Pelham’s use of a short sample from Metal…

When the French music group Petit Homme signed a special contract with Sacem, the French collecting society for music composers, some saw the contract’s exclusion of the group’s internet rights as a step towards compatibility between collecting societies and CC: authors could control of their internet rights while collecting societies would handle the remaining rights…

In yesterday’s Personal Tech Q&A section of The New York Times, there was a useful item called Making Use of Public Domain (registration required, although I was able to see the page at first without logging in) that describes a bit about how images that are found online can be used. The article points to…

Digital Tipping Point, a documentary on the free software and free culture movements, recently posted over 80 digitized hours (350 hours have been shot in total) of CC BY-SA licensed footage of “leading politicians, CEOs, and software developers from all over the world.” The footage is available for free at their archive.org page: The DTP…

Last night I had the pleasure of attending Art Knows No Borders, an event that was both a fundraiser for Doctors Without Borders and a release party for Bombardirovka, a book written by Crystal Allen Cook in 2004 while she was in Armenia on a Fulbright Scholarship. The novel is a work of fiction that,…

We just received some tremendously exciting news. Democracy Now! – the daily news program broadcast by hundreds of radio and television stations around the world (it’s also the source of a very popular podcast) – is now being offered under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. This includes not only new episodes, but also those in…

Magnatune, the terrific sharing-friendly record label that we’ve talked about many times before, has announced a transition from a per-album purchase model to a “DRM-free, all-you-can-eat, pay-what-you-want” model. Label founder John Buckman spelled out the details in a blog post today. Memberships to Magnatune are now: 1) no commitment: one month at a time, whereas…

Spot.us is a recentlly launched nonprofit project from the Center for Media Change that aims to pioneer “community funded reporting.” Stories are pitched online with an amount of money needed for publication – users and site visitors can donate to any pitch they deem worthy, with the resulting article released under a CC BY license.…

Kaltura, an “open-source platform for video creation, management, interaction, and collaboration”, boasts a robust platform uncommon among web-apps that includes the ability to annotate, remix, edit, and share video collaboratively over the web. Of particular interest to the CC-community is Kaltura’s decision to require that all user-submitted media be licensed under a CC BY-SA license,…