Exciting news from Indaba Music – alternative rock band Third Eye Blind have teamed up with the former Featured Commoner to offer fans of the band, and Indaba members, increased interaction with the band’s music and writing process. 3EB will posting unfinished song stems to the community site, allowing members to take the stems, reuse/remix…

There’s been a whole lot of press on open textbooks lately, in addition to my own posts on the Flexbook and the Student PIRGs’ recent report encouraging open source textbooks as the right model for digital textbooks (versus the limited e-books that commercial publishers currently offer). The difference in open source and commercial e-books is…

LA-based multi-instrumentalist and former Featured Commoner Monk Turner released his latest album, Love Story, a little under a week ago for free download on archive.org. The album is released under a CC BY-NC-ND license, making it his fifth album released in this vein, his second this year, and twentieth overall. From Monk Turner: I wasn’t…

XMP is the format Creative Commons recommends for embedding metadata (such as licensing information) in most media file types. Frankly there isn’t much competition — embedded metadata is poorly supported, formats are balkanized, and nobody save Adobe (XMP’s developer) has had the willingness to work on a problem that can only be solved over many…

Blogger and Director of Content Development @ blip.tv, Eric Mortensen, does a fantastic job of curating high resolution Creative Commons licensed photos. He uses Flickr’s ‘Favorite‘ function in an innovative way — all the work he favorites gets pushed to a RSS feed that you can subscribe to. Here’s a clip of the gallery he’s…

A number of articles from CC insiders hit the blogs this week. I have one up at Media Rights, a site that focuses on social-justice documentaries and the activist filmmaker community. I focus my examples on how Creative Commons can help film makers reach greater audiences and media by framing them in light of the…

We mentioned last year that SixApart had developed a CC licensing widget for their TypePad hosted blogging service, but it’s worth mentioning again, because it’s a really nice implementation. The CC widget is now available via the TypePad Widget Gallery. If you have a TypePad blog you can visit the gallery or the widget directly…

We’ve all heard of the textbook. Some of us have read one or two in school. Others of us have stared blankly at pages filled with outdated information. Still, others of us are more resourceful and have used the bulky things to prop up rickety ends of tables. But all of us have had to…

Brad Sucks, a CC-staff favorite musician, released his new album Out Of It this past Monday online, for free, and under a CC BY-SA license. From the Brad Sucks blog: A lot’s changed since I started putting music on the Internet way back in 2001. Artist-endorsed free downloads were shocking. Flexible pricing was still an…

General Fuzz, an artist who creates self-described “lush melodic instrumental electronica”, released his new album, Soulful Filling, at the beginning of this month, bringing his number of CC BY-NC-SA licensed albums to an amazing 5. All the tracks, along with General Fuzz’s other music, are free to download at his website. What really sets Soulful…