Not wanting April Fool’s Day to overshadow this announcement, we’re posting today about the 250,000 images recently donated to Wikimedia Commons, a sister project of Wikipedia. The images, part of the German Photo Collection at Saxony’s State and University Library (SLUB), are being uploaded with corresponding captions and metadata. Afterward, volunteers will link the photos,…

San Francisco, CA, USA — 04/01/2009 Noted educator, education innovator, and journalist Esther Wojcicki today became Chair of the Creative Commons (CC) Board of Directors, taking over from founding board member James Boyle. Wojcicki first joined the board of Creative Commons last July. Creative Commons is a world wide non-profit organization that promotes the creative…

Creative Commons Thailand has adapted Creative Commons licenses to Thai law! The localized licenses, launching April 2 at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, enable Thai creators to easily share creative works by lowering legal barriers and prohibitive transaction costs. The Thai team, led by Mr. Phichai Phuechmongkol of Dharmniti Law Office (DLO), conducted the…

Bangkok, Thailand and Berlin, Germany Creative Commons Thailand has adapted the Creative Commons licenses to Thai law. The localized licenses, launching April 2, enable Thai creators to easily share creative works by lowering legal barriers and prohibitive transaction costs. The Thai team, led by Mr. Phichai Phuechmongkol of Dharmniti Law Office (DLO), conducted the porting…

Cory Doctorow points us towards an excellent essay from the team behind Digital Foundations on ten key steps to negotiating a CC-licensed release with a large scale publisher: 4. Pitch it with facts Use case studies to argue with facts. It also helps for them to see that other reputable publishers have licensed books Creative…

Domas Mituzas writes in an extremely nice post: It takes time to understand one is ‘creative commoner’. I do have a t-shirt with such caption, but it is much more comfortable once you start feeling real power of use and reuse of information. Few anecdotes… He tells stories of the joy of being reused (see…

Flatworld Knowledge, an open textbook initiative that has been in development since 2007, received $8 million in investments earlier this week. That’s right. $8 million. In investments, not grants. The open textbook world got a lot of press last fall, and I’m guessing that not long after it started piquing the interest of the rich…

The open educational resources movement has been picking up steam lately, even attracting the attention of legislators. What’s hot in the new Persian year (aka the start of spring) is the recently introduced “OER Bill“. What’s that, you say? Well in its own words, it’s a bill “To require Federal agencies to collaborate in the…

The open educational resources movement has been picking up steam lately, even attracting the attention of legislators. What’s hot in the new Persian year (aka the start of spring) is the recently introduced “OER Bill“. What’s that, you say? Well in its own words, it’s a bill “To require Federal agencies to collaborate in the…

Once again the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase has selected great creative works to include in the latest version of Ubuntu, this version due out in April. As with the previous Show Case, all of the winning entries will be bundled with the Ubuntu release and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. This time, however,…