Freddie Stevenson, a British singer-songwriter, recently unveiled his new album, All My Strange Companions to some nice praise stateside. Released under a CC BY-NC-SA license, All My Strange Companions features melodic, acoustic-based, pop that is sharable/remixable as long as Stevenson is credited, it is noncommercial in intenet, and is released under the same license if…

The iSummit, an annual conference that originally grew around Creative Commons, but has grown beyond CC to encompass related movements, has announced its 2008 schedule. As befitting a conference dedicated to global digital culture and hosted by Sapporo, Japan, the schedule is very diverse, including tracks on open education, open business, local/global collaboration, openness in…

Wikimedia Commons editor and Australian Brianna Laugher wrote up some thoughtful notes on Creative Commons Australia’s recent conference: Nonetheless, what can we learn from how CC conducts itself? I can’t speak for the other jurisdictions, but the Australian one is damn impressive. They do an incredible amount of gently-gently lobbying for the adoption of free…

The program for the First Interdisciplinary Research Workshop on Free Culture has been announced: We received 29 submissions for research presentations and each submission was reviewed by at least 3 reviewers, sometimes more! So the total was about 90 reviews written in a rather short amount of time. Of course we’re talking about extended abstracts…

Identi.ca, an open source/free software + open content = open service microblogging service launched today. From the FAQ: How is Identi.ca different from Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Plurk, others? Identi.ca is an Open Network Service. Our main goal is to provide a fair and transparent service that preserves users’ autonomy. In particular, all the software used…

Over the last week we’ve noticed at two instances where editors from mainstream newspapers have confused whether a particular image is licensed under Creative Commons, is in the public domain, or is all rights reserved. In one case, Technology Editor Charles Arthur of The Guardian blogged about a dust up between some photographers and eBay:…

Just one week after the big release of the Case Studies project, things are doing great!  The project has garnered a lot of attention as can be seen from this example list. Some of the things said about the project include these two excerpts. Ruth Suehle from Red Hat Magazine said: Despite having just launched,…

Adam Gnade, a musician based in Portland, OR, recently published his first book, Hymn California, through CC-friendly distribution group CASH Music (blogged earlier here and here). Released under a CC BY-NC-ND license, the book is being serialized online in PDF form, one chapter a month over the next year along with a piece of music…

Severed Fifth is a new project from Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon in which he plans to document the process of becoming a musician in the ‘new music economy’, something he hopes to accomplish largely through using CC licensing. Two goals of the project, from Severed Fifth: One. Severed Fifth is the name of my…

Google Book Search recently did a great service for those interested in the public domain by digitizing a huge amount of copyright renewal data for books dating as far back as 1923. From Inside Google Book Search: How do you find out whether a book was renewed? You have to check the U.S. Copyright Office…