A major upgrade to mozCC, the Creative Commons metadata companion for Mozilla-based browers, is now available. This version looks better, fixes a performance problem with some pages, and sets the stage for version 1.0. See Nathan Yergler’s blog post for details. Mozilla status bar: browsing a CC-licensed page. Click on status bar icons, see metadata…

Over at the new Flickr blog, they’ve announced support for Creative Commons in Flickr. Flickr’s a site to share photos like no other: it’s a social software application that lets you define friends and family, you can annotate photos, share photos in a live chat using an innovative interface, form groups around topics, and now…

I’ll be at the California state capitol tomorrow morning to talk to the state senate’s education committee about the public domain and Creative Commons. I’ll be there in a purely informational capacity to provide some context for a broader discussion about community colleges, higher ed, and royalty-free educational materials. More soon.

We are happy to hear that current and upcoming operating systems will have built-in support for application-level metadata. Gnome (Linux), Longhorn (next version of Windows) , and Tiger (next release of OS X) all will be offering some way to store and search metadata for files and applications. Google is also expected to get into…

A-list blogger and CC board member Joi Ito has posted a thoughtful mini essay on why he uses a license that allows commercial use for his blog. He also writes about the decision of whether or not to use a license with the ShareAlike provision. Of course you can always make your own choice via…

Cricket fans, take note: CaribbeanCricket.com‘s photo journals feature user-submitted pics of cricket matches from the West Indies, all licensed under a Creative Commons license. Here’s a nice mid-bowl action shot.

Earlier today Steve Griffin announced a CC Search Sidebar for Mozilla-Based Browsers. Previously Steve has worked on a C# API for CC metadata. A mycroft search plugin for the CC search engine is also available. The mycroft plugin adds a new search engine to those available from the Mozilla Firefox toolbar.

Creative Commons has a simple strategy for linking licensing information in mp3s and other media files often found on P2P networks back to the web. Until now implementing that strategy was rather a pain for publishers. The only tools were command line, and those depended upon a gaggle of libraries not already installed on a…

Lucas Gonze: What I am thinking is that we need a tech social movement to fix web multimedia by insisting that web standards be followed. REST was such a movement in the protocol space. The Zeldman-inspired movement to use structural HTML and CSS only did the same thing with design. This would be a direct…

Wired has a bizarre story of music and sampling royalties involving found sound recordings by one person sold as CDs which the band Wilco sampled from. What is unusual about the case is the company claiming copyright on the sounds, Irdial Discs, didn’t perform or write the shortwave broadcasts of what is reportedly hours of…