The Center for Social Media at AU has released a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare. From the press release, “OpenCourseWare, the Web-based publication of academic course content launched in 2002 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has been lauded for making college-level courses available to anyone anywhere in the world…
CASH Music, a nonprofit organization that builds “open tools and services to benefit artists and music organizations”, recently launched its first fundraiser in conjunction with a number of amazing artists and labels. An online raffle is at the core of their efforts with some incredible prizes available ranging from signed sheet music to vinyl test…
I blogged about the Digital Open in April, a new online community and competition that was accepting free and open technology projects from anyone 17 or younger through August. The competition was aimed at fostering an online and open community of youth by encouraging them to see the benefits of open source and open licensing.…
The 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded today to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson for their research on economic governance. Ostrom’s award is particularly exciting, for it cites her study of the commons. Commons? That sounds familiar! Ostrom’s pioneering work mostly concerns the governance of common-pool resources — resources that are rivalrous (i.e., scarce,…
A prominent member of the open education community, Stephen Downes is a researcher, blogger, and big thinker in open education and access related issues. He frequently debates with other open education advocates via the medium of the Internet, once in a while meeting up in person at conferences to hash out more of the same.…
Weezie’s Birthday Ballooning by Richard Giles / CC BY-SA Richard Giles, a social media specialist in Australia who frequently posts and CC licenses photos on Flickr, received a threatening letter from the International Olympic Committee last week, mentioning a set of photos he had taken at the 2008 games in Beijing. Giles posted a rundown…
The Software Freedom Law Show, Episode 0x16 contains numerous bits of interest to CC geeks and is well worth a listen. The show’s hosts, Karen Sandler and Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Law Center, discuss among other things: How the GFDL turned out suboptimally — a key point is that developing good public licenses…
DJ Vadim and Creative Commons are celebrating ccMixter‘s fifth anniversary with Secret Mixter October ’09. In this event, the 6th of its kind on ccMixter, starting today, musicians and singers sign up to have their name put into a virtual hat. After the two week sign-up period, everyone is notified, in secret, with a remix…
A little over two years ago award-winning novelist Jon Evans released Beasts Of New York, a self-described “children’s book for adults”, online and for free under our Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license. He chose this license to help facilitate sharing, a decision we elaborated upon previously: Evans wanted to write and release a novel his publishers…
Today marks the launch of Creative Commons’ 5th Annual Fundraising Campaign. This year, more than ever before, it is vital that we all support choice and sharing online. Truly, everyone benefits from a free and open internet, and we have only just begun to see how beneficial a culture of sharing can be. We are…