Congratulations to the winners of the first annual SPARKY Awards. The SPARK(IES) challenge entrants “to imaginatively illustrate in a short video the value of sharing ideas and information.” Check out the winning videos over at Blip.tv. “Share” – Habib Yazdi, CC BY “Pri Vetai: Private Eye” – Tommy McCauley and Max Silver, CC BY “An…
It was a busy day yesterday for campaigns to open up educational access and opportunities. In addition to the Cape Town Declaration, the Student PIRGs in the United States just launched a major campaign to encourage faculty to adopt open educational resources in their classrooms, which will provide significant benefit to students in making college…
Public broadcasters often ask themselves: how to better enable tax payers to access the works that they have paid for? This was the question that the BBC, the public broadcaster for the United Kingdom, addressed in 2004 during the debate over its charter renewal. The result of their deliberations was a yearlong pilot, the Creative…
Today marks the release of Small Arm of Sea, the debut album by female indietronica singer, songwriter and producer Tone (Sofie Nielsen). While the album itself is unique in its style and substance, seamlessly combining abstract electronic composition techniques with a clear pop sensibility, it is equally as intriguing in terms of distribution. Small Arm…
Cory Doctorow has completed recording an audiobook version of Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. This important book captures the rise of the hacker subculture and documents the beginnings of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Doctorow spent the last year recording installments of the book, releasing incremental podcasts on his…
We are a bit late in posting this, but check out “Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video” from the Center for Social Media at American University. They argue that fair use is likely much larger than we imagine, specifically in relation to online video, and the clip real they put together makes…
In our most recent “Featured Commoner” piece, we catch up with musician Monk Turner, who experiments not only with a variety of musical styles but also distribution techniques, having released a slew of concept albums through the internet archive (all CC licensed). His most recent album, Monk Turner’s Calendar, came out this past week and…
In December we reported on the great news that MIT’s Open CourseWare initiative had released their 1,800th course, thereby publishing the entire MIT curriculum on OCW. MIT has now released comprehensive video recordings of the celebratory event, all published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. The keynote address was given by New York Times…
Lawrence Lessig, our CEO, just announced that his book The Future of Ideas is now licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. With this news, all of Lessig’s books are now freely licensed. Accolades to Random House, the publisher, for taking the brave and exciting step of sharing this work with the commons. Read more…
CC0 is a Creative Commons project designed to promote and protect the public domain by 1) enabling authors to easily waive their copyrights in particular works and to communicate that waiver to others, and 2) providing a means by which any person can assert that there are no copyrights in a particular work, in a…