The launch ceremony of the Belgian CC Licences took place in the Bibliotheque Royale in Brussels on 10 December as part of the electronic music and free software festival Jonctions 8. Creative Commons country head Severine Dusollier – a young researcher of copyright law at the University of Namur – had invited an interesting panel…

Friends of Creative Commons, As 2004 draws to a close, Creative Commons is strong. In the past two years since Creative Commons licenses have been available, we’ve taken our first large first steps with you–building some of the essential tools, adding critical pieces of infrastructure and assembling a vibrant community. In 2004, Glenn, Larry, and…

Duke Law School, Center for the Study of the Public Domain, has posted the eight finalists to their Arts Project Moving Image Contest. The contest asked entrants to create short films demonstrating some of the tensions between art and intellectual property law, and the intellectual property issues artists face, focusing on either music or documentary…

Today we launched a new site, and a new contest. Check out CC Mixter to win a chance to be on the next Fine Arts Militia album featuring Chuck D, or a chance to be featured on the Creative Commons release, THE WIRED CD: Ripped. Sampled. Mashed. Shared. Sample The Beastie Boys, David Byrne, DJ…

Lucas Gonze has a way with words: Can I just say this? Napster politics are brutally boring. The action right now is in making the music and video owned by the major labels and film studios archaic and unpopular. We’re going to do to those properties what talkies did to silent films, what political bloggers…

In October 2003, our website redesign included a new page called Technology Challenges, where we invited volunteer developers to tackle some tough coding projects that could help the cause. Within a couple of weeks, some dude named Nathan Yergler had picked a couple of formidable challenges off like sitting ducks. First was CCMoz, the Firefox…

On December 15, 2004 Creative Commons will launch the Fine Art of Sampling Contest. The contest intends to build off of the WIRED CD, where contestants will be challenged to sample the WIRED CD song(s) they love most, into their own creation of musical genius. Look for the announcement here on December 15th!

At the turn of 2004, we laid out our New Year’s Resolutions for Creative Commons. The year’s not quite up, but I’m going offline soon, so I thought it would be a good time to check in on our progress. I’m happy to report that the state of the Commons is strong. (If I personally…

Making music mash-ups (combining two songs, layered one over the other) is relatively easy for those in the know when compared with recording your own tracks, but it’s not always easy to pick up an audio application and understand the ins and outs of it. While some have called for tutorials to help music fans…

The FreeCulture.org undead art contest is over and winners have been announced. Taking first prize is the very well done bit of droll humor How to Survive a Zombie Epidemic. All of the entries and source material are in the public domain or CC-licensed, so you’re free to reuse in your own horror spoof, music…