Shop books Shop music Shop movies Books Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity by Lawrence Lessig Creative Commons co-founder, Lawrence Lessig, ‘the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era’ (The New Yorker), masterfully argues that never before in… Buy it Share on Twitter Share on Facebook The Art of Asking:…

Philip Pullman / Adrian Hon / CC BY-SA Catherine Casserly / Joi Ito / CC BY The Index on Censorship just published a dialogue on the future of copyright between Creative Commons CEO Cathy Casserly and British writer and Society of Authors president Philip Pullman. Pullman writes that internet piracy has made it harder for…

Creative Commons provides a range of licenses, each of which grants different rights to use the materials licensed under them. All of these licenses offer more permissions than “all rights reserved.” To help show more clearly what the different CC licenses let people do, CC marks the most permissive of its licenses as “Approved for…

Author, blogger, and permissive copyright activist Cory Doctorow writes a regular column for Locus, a monthly magazine that covers science fiction and fantasy publishing. His current column, “Why I Copyfight,” is filled with thoughtful analysis of why writers are increasingly using open approaches to distributing their work. A year ago, Doctorow wrote a great piece…

Bloomsbury Publishing, one of Europe’s leading independent publishing houses (you may have heard of their fiction series Harry Potter, among other fantastic fiction and non-fiction titles) announced today that it is launching an CC-exclusive publishing imprint called Bloomsbury Academic: All books will be made available free of charge online, with free downloads, for non-commercial purposes…

In a provocative interview with Cory Doctorow about his new book Little Brother, the non-satirical Onion A.V. club investigates the blogger cum sci-fi author’s motivations and strategies for convincing his publisher to simultaneously release his young adult book under CC and hardcover: AVC: Was the Creative Commons release strategy a hard sell with Tor that…

Over the holidays, we caught up with acclaimed writer (and podcaster) James Patrick Kelly and asked him some questions regarding the interesting and unique ways he has embraced CC licenses for his work. Read on to find out what positives Kelly has seen in using CC as well as which CC evangelist (hint: he also…

Although we took a little break in our “Featured Commoner” series over the holidays, we are back in action with many more stories and interviews for the new year. First up in 2008 is Hugh Hancock, Artistic Director ad Co-Founder of Strange Company, the “world’s oldest pro ‘Machinima‘ production company” and producers of acclaimed full-length…

To the Commoners community, from Cory Doctorow: My writing career and Creative Commons are inextricably bound together. My first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published by Tor, the largest science fiction publisher in the world, on January 9, 2003, just a few days after CC launched its first licenses. I was…

Last night the podcast edition of James Patrick Kelly’s Hugo-nominated novella Burn won the Nebula Award for best science fiction/fantasy novella published in the U.S. during the two previous years. Cory Doctorow writes on Boing Boing: As far as I know, that makes it the first Creative Commons licensed work and the first podcast to…