The Indie Band Survival Guide, originally released as a CC-licensed PDF, has gone professional with a recent pressing in physical form. Written by Randy Chertkow and Jason Feehan (otherwise known as Chicago-based band Beatnik Turtle), the book explores the ability for indie bands to be successful on their own, without the help of a major…

Michael Wesch, creator of the strikingly insightful videos “A Vision of Students Today” and “The Machine is Us/ing Us”, gave a presentation at the Library of Congress back in May on the anthropology of YouTube. The presentation was the third in a series called “Digital Natives,” natives being basically my and probably your generation if…

When I was a kid, the only dictionary around the house was a monumental hardcover my little brother used as a stool to reach the cookie jar. We hardly ever looked inside of it, and when we did, we couldn’t find any words used in the real world. It was the super duper collegiate university…

The Alameda County Computer Resource Center, a Bay Area non-profit whose motto is “Obsolescence is Just a Lack of Imagination”, is organizing an Installfest for Schools at LinuxWorld August 4-7th. The Center will be refurbishing recycled computers and donating them to Bay Area schools that can put them to good use.  And as CC has…

If you’re in the Bay Area for the Linux World Expo, stop by the Exhibit Hall today through Thursday and say “hi”. If you’d like to support CC, we’ll have t-shirts for people donating more than $10. We’ll also be giving away stickers and other random CC paraphernalia. Hope to see you there!

YouTube has become quite the battleground for copyright claims and our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have found some great opportunities to defend fair use and put our licenses to work. Just yesterday they settled a deal between Brian Sapient and Explorologist Ltd. over the fair use of clips critiquing performer Uri Geller’s claims…

Coming to a Linux distribution near you: The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase. The Community Manager for Ubuntu, Jono Bacon, just announced a contest to have your song or video distributed with the next Ubuntu release in October! What this means is that Ubuntu is giving free culture musicians and movie creators the opportunity to get…

Join us next Wednesday, August 13, for a memorable CC Salon as we hear more about Creative Commons in the realm of film and media. Check out the presentation lineup: * Jolene Pinder, Associate Producer at Arts Engine, Inc. in NYC will screen a short CC-licensed film and talk about the various ways in which…

Epic Fu is a web-based show that focuses on “the coolest art, tech, and music from the online and offline world”. Formerly known as JETSET, Epic Fu is the brainchild of Zadi Diaz and Steve Woolf – they post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday released under a CC BY-NC-SA license. We recently caught up…

Donna Wentworth writes over at the Science Commons blog … Big news:  Microsoft Research has unveiled new add-ins for some of the most popular Microsoft products to make them more useful for the scientific community — including tools for creating, sharing and preserving research in the formats used by scientific publishers and digital archives. The…