PhD students slave for years on researching, writing, and drafting a final product, usually text, that marks the culmination of their candidacy for the highly esteemed doctoral degree. This product is then reviewed by a tenured member of the faculty in their domain of expertise, or a small committee of said members. Upon passing this…

From CC Australia: A couple of days ago the [Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s] excellent collaborative media site, Pool, posted a recording of genetics professor Steve Jones talking about Darwin’s life and work under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial licence. As far as we’re aware, this is the very first time material from the ABC archives has been…

YouTube just made an incredibly exciting announcement: it’s testing an option that gives video owners the ability to allow downloads and share their work under Creative Commons licenses. The test is being launched with a handful of partners, including Stanford, Duke, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UCTV. We are always looking for ways to make it…

We hope you’ll join us tomorrow evening at our CC Salon SF from 7-9pm at PariSoMa, located at 1436 Howard Street, San Francisco (map and directions). You’ll get the chance to meet the entire CC staff and hear about our latest projects on the international scene and in education, science, and culture. There will also…

Today, Creative Commons, in collaboration with Nike and Best Buy, announces a new project – GreenXchange – exploring how the digital commons can help holders of patents collaborate for sustainability. GreenXchange will be hosted inside the Science Commons wing of CC. GreenXchange draws on the experience of Creative Commons in creating “some rights reserved” regimes…

by the UNESCO Open Educational Resources Community today. For those of you who don’t know, the UNESCO OER Community is an international online community “[connecting] over 700 individuals in 105 countries to share information and discuss issues surrounding the production and use of Open Educational Resources – web-based materials offered freely and openly for use…

We mentioned late last year that Jeremy Keith’s CC BY licensed photo was used in the film Iron Man. While that was particularly notable, Jeremy is a prolific user of CC licenses for his photos and other materials, garnering many reuses. A graphic design student asked him a series of 15 questions about CC. He…

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick gave a great case study lecture on Nine Inch Nails’ music business successes at MidemNet last month. He describes the “formula” as: Connect With Fans (CwF) + Reason To Buy (RtB) = The Business Model ($$$$) Toward the end of the video he explains CwF also means “Compete with Free” and RtB…

More than a year ago, Free Culture advocate Anas Tawileh analyzed the state of Arabic content online. His portal Arab Commons has grown modestly but steadily since its launch in 2007, offering 11 full textbooks in Arabic, plus magazines, podcasts, poetry collections, and a number of art works — all within a few months. For…

If you’re like me, you probably never even heard of the TED conference until TED Talks launched online (in April of 2007). TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design” and their talks are given annually at the TED conference in Long Beach, CA. 50 speakers give “talks” or 18 minute speeches about a variety of issues,…