Here’s a great idea: A conference that compares how creativity is regulated in fashion versus how it’s regulated in other art forms. In fashion, copyright (among other things) is pretty laissez-faire compared to, say, music or film. On January 29, 2005, the Norman Lear Center will hold a landmark event on fashion and the ownership…

I’ll be on a panel on Digital Rights Management tomorrow at high noon at the Sundance Film Festival. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a key issue for any company that controls content or has a library it wants to exploit. Balancing issues of copyright/privacy versus profit is no small challenge. In the new digital age,…

Magnatune provides “Internet music without the guilt.” Based in Berkeley, California, Magnatune is a record label with a 21st Century business model, offering consumers a unique mix of free and paid music. One of the first for-profit companies to adopt Creative Commons’ copyright licenses into its strategy, Magnatune has amassed both an impressive buzz and…

Ok, #9 on the Toronto Eye’s Anti-Hit List, with very some cool company. It’s a start! Here’s the Eye’s pick on CC Mixter: fake french [le tigre est fatigué], featuring samples from several WIRED CD tracks. It’s about discovery now.

Juan Carlos De Martin writes in with a report on last month’s Creative Commons Italy launch: The Italian CC Licenses were launched in Turin on December 16th, with a conference at the Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli. Over 100 people crowded the attractive conference room of the Fondazione, with several journalists in attendance to cover the event.…

MIT Technology Review just published an article that nicely ties together three related news items: IBM’s release of 500 patents for use in open source developments, Bill Gates’s “communist” screed, and Science Commons. The article misleads on one point: The Creative Commons licenses allow writers, artists and musicians to put their work into the public…

Yesterday evening iCommons was invited to give a lecture about CC at download-culture.org, a student-run initiative of the University of Luneburg, Germany. Chiming in with current discussion in other countries, I was subjected to an interesting exchange about the role collecting societies should play in affording authors and musicians greater individual choice with regard to…

The New York Times continues to write about mash-ups as if they just discovered them. Today a sidebar outlining the history of sampling and mash-ups appears in the Week in Review. Conspicuously missing: The WIRED CD and the current “Fine Art of Sampling” contest. (Negativland gets a mention, though.)

While we’ve been testing out CC Publisher betas over the past few weeks, we’ve recently gone 1.0 on the application and figured it was a good time to create an easy to follow tutorial for using CC Publisher. We’ve also created one for CC Lookup, our audio file verification app. In addition to both new…

Staccato is a music program featuring all Creative Commons licensed tracks selected by Matt May. If you dig the sort of super eclectic show often found on the best community and college radio stations where the dj cares about nothing but the music and knows the music, sometimes producing transcendent experiences … you’ll be comfortable…