Digital Tipping Point, a documentary on the free software and free culture movements, recently posted over 80 digitized hours (350 hours have been shot in total) of CC BY-SA licensed footage of “leading politicians, CEOs, and software developers from all over the world.” The footage is available for free at their archive.org page: The DTP…

Last night I had the pleasure of attending Art Knows No Borders, an event that was both a fundraiser for Doctors Without Borders and a release party for Bombardirovka, a book written by Crystal Allen Cook in 2004 while she was in Armenia on a Fulbright Scholarship. The novel is a work of fiction that,…

Mark Hosler, co-founder of experimental music and sound collage act Negativland, recently took a trip to Washington D.C., where he penned this letter to members of congress on creativity and copyright. From metroactive: Ours is a world in which copyright has fallen woefully behind the curve of what the public actually wants to do with…

We just received some tremendously exciting news. Democracy Now! – the daily news program broadcast by hundreds of radio and television stations around the world (it’s also the source of a very popular podcast) – is now being offered under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. This includes not only new episodes, but also those in…

Creative Commons is working with Universitat de Barcelona to create Spain jurisdiction-specific licenses from the generic Creative Commons licenses. CCi Spain List Project Lead: Ignasi Labastida i Juan License draft (PDF). English re-translation (PDF). Post a message. Subscribe to the discussion. Read the discussion archives. Archives English explanation of substantive legal changes (v1.0) (PDF). More…

Copyright Clearance Center has just launched Ozmo, a new web-based service focused on helping photographers, bloggers, and other content creators license their work for commercial use. Ozmo supports Creative Commons’ CC+ protocol (see the press release about CC+ for more information), meaning that it enables creators to license their work to the public under one set of…

This past weekend, The New York Times Magazine published an excellent feature on author and scholar Lewis Hyde, best known for his book The Gift, a landmark assessment of the gift economy and the value of doing creative work in a commodity-driven culture. I read The Gift a few years ago, and pieces from it…

Spot.us is a recentlly launched nonprofit project from the Center for Media Change that aims to pioneer “community funded reporting.” Stories are pitched online with an amount of money needed for publication – users and site visitors can donate to any pitch they deem worthy, with the resulting article released under a CC BY license.…

Samtani Anil, Deputy Director Nanyang Business School.

Jonathan Coulton; photo by Del Far under CC BY 2.0 To our community – for our next commoner letter we are featuring an artist who has really proven that the CC model works for musicians. Jonathan Coulton has made a career out of sharing his music with his fans, not just aurally, but digitally and…