Manu Sporny of Digital Bazaar just posted an entirely non-technical video explaining the Semantic Web. The video and all of its source material are available under a CC Attribution-ShareAlike license for sharing and remixing. Quote from the video: If you can open a web browser, you can understand the Semantic Web. CC has been using…

San Francisco — December 17, 2007 Today, Creative Commons announced the launch of CC0 (aka CC Zero) and CC+ (aka CC Plus). These programs are major additions to CC’s array of free legal tools. CC+ CC+ is a protocol to enable a simple way for users to get rights beyond the rights granted by a…

Since the beginning we’ve provided our licenses for three separate, distinct audiences: humans, lawyers and machines. The machine audience has been served by metadata versions of the licenses. This metadata is encoded with the HTML you get from the license chooser, as well as for each individual license. For example, you can find the metadata…

Denise Howell writing at ZDNet has a nice report on IP and the user generated economy at TechCrunch40 about new collaboration services that have affordances for CC licenses, and some that should: The clips forming the foundation of musicshake creations are all licensed, and the company plans to let users sell their creations, keeping some…

We’re pleased to announce a user-friendly installer for our software to examine Creative Commons licensing from inside Adobe applications like Photoshop. Furthermore, the licensing metadata that you see in Photoshop is interoperable with other metadata packages in Free Software like Exempi. A week ago I took this picture of our lovely web engineer Nathan Kinkade…

Copyright scholar Pamela Samuelson has published a very readable call to begin thinking about comprehensive copyright reform in the form of a model law. Those familiar with Creative Commons will recognize that rationale for and obstacles to reform at the government level demonstrate the critical role played by Creative Commons. Samuelson on part of the…

Today marks the public-launch of Vinismo, “a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date, and reliable guide of all wines in the world”. Vinismo utilizes a collaborative wiki-infrastructure that will hopefully lead to a detailed, readable, useful wine guide for people at any level of expertise. Vinismo is founded by Evan Prodromou (of WikiTravel –…

Creative Commons maintains and publishes policies that apply to the use of our legal tools, our websites, content and software that we publish, our trademarks, and to those participating in the Creative Commons Global Network. Note that some of these policies are maintained on other website pages but can be viewed by clicking on the…

John Wilbanks will be giving a talk in the virtual world Second Life this Monday (4/16). Taking on avatar-form for his first official SL speaking engagement, Wilbanks will be giving an introduction to Science Commons. The talk – “Scientific Research and the Creative Commons Methodology” – will shed light on the application of CC copyright…

When we launched version 3.0 of the CC licenses February 23 we also switched on a number of graphical, language, and technical updates. This is the first of a very tardy series of posts about those updates. Creative Commons license deeds are the “human readable” explanation of the “lawyer readable” licenses (e.g., see the Attribution-ShareAlike…