Kembrew McLeod is currently an Assistant Professor, University of Iowa, Department of Communication Studies. In addition to being an academic, Kembrew is a self-professed prankster. In 1998 he trademarked the phrase “Freedom of Expression®” as a comment on how the intellectual property law is being used to fence off culture and restrict the way in…

Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer are the members of The Lonely Island, an LA-based comedy collective, who have released much of their music and video shorts online under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Also known as “the dudes”, Andy, Jorma and Akiva soon found that they were developing a fan base, some of…

Dateline: 1980. New York-based typesetter Rick Prelinger was trying to “make it in the movies” and writing a reference book on two-way radio frequencies on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Two years later, he became the Research Director for “Heavy Petting,” the Norman Lear-funded Atomic Café-like documentary about sexuality in the 20th Century. Armed with photocopies…

Wiley Wiggins has starred in the films Dazed and Confused, Waking Life (on which he also worked as an animator), and Frontier. Wiggins was a contributing editor to the late, great FringeWare Review. His collection of short Stories, Solarcon-6, is available for free under a Creative Commons license from his website (also licensed!). We caught…

MediaRights.org is an innovative non-profit, based in New York, but accessible around the world via their website that helps to showcase important social issue documentaries and puts media makers, educators, librarians, nonprofits, and activists in contact with each other to enable the use of documentaries to generate discussion and encourage action on contemporary social issues.…

Ourmedia launched three months ago as a home for grassroots media. The site provides a place where anyone can upload video, music, photos, audio clips and other personal media and store it for free on ourmedia’s servers forever. Uploaders have the option of making their works available under a Creative Commons license. Recently, Ourmedia was…

A museum exhibit called “Illegal Art” might sound like a history of naughty pictures. Turns out that the exhibit (through July 25 at SF MOMA Artist’s Gallery) is more innocuous than most primetime TV: A Mickey Mouse gasmask. Pez candy dispensers honoring fallen hip-hop stars. A litigious Little Mermaid. Not kids’ stuff, exactly—but illegal? Copyright…

Flickr is a new photo management application that lets you annotate photos, share them with friends and family, and now, apply Creative Commons licenses to your shared photos. Flickr’s co-founder, Stewart Butterfield, talked to Creative Commons about this interesting application. Creative Commons: Can you tell us how flickr came to be? Stewart Butterfield, Flickr: That’s…

Scott Andrew LePera founded the lo-fi folk-rock project the Walkingbirds in 1998, around the same time he discovered the Web. Since then he’s actively recorded and released songs in MP3 format directly onto the Web from his little bedroom studio in Northern California. The Walkingbirds’ website sees several hundred downloads each month from all over…