We are very honored to announce that our close collaborators, the Eurasia Partnership Foundation, has opened a grant competition to support the adoption of the Creative Commons licensing framework in the countries of the South Caucasus. Proposals may be submitted for Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. From their website: The initiative seeks to enable and popularize…

Nation Beat, a musical group that “bridges folkloric Brazilian rhythms with classic American roots music”, is set to release their sophomore album, Legends of the Preacher, on July 15th 2008. In conjunction with their release, Nation Beat and record label Modiba Productions are sponsoring an animation contest based on the band and their songs, with…

We’ve rolled out a few small changes to search.creativecommons.org: The part of the interface we control is now translatable, and has five languages enabled now — Afrikaans, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), English, and Japanese. You can suggest translations here. A screencast on using ccSearch with Firefox, including how to change your default search engine, and…

Building Commons and Community, a book written by the late Karl Linn on his experience “creating neighborhood spaces for communities and by communities”, has been released under a CC BY-NC-ND license. From New Village Press: Landscape architect and child psychologist Karl Linn (1923-2005) was a beloved, down-to-earth, visionary leader of grassroots community building, who brought…

Apture is a new tool for bloggers that allows “content creators the power to find and incorporate relevant multimedia items directly into their pages” by adding links and small navigator windows to pages and posts automatically. Better understood in practice (see screenshot below), Apture seems poised to add incredible functionality to web pages that, while…

Yesterday the U.S. House of Representatives passed the “PRO-IP Act” 410 to 11. The bill, if also passed by the U.S. Senate and made law, could create a “copyright czar” office and greatly expand copyright enforcement in and outside of the U.S. Slashdot is of course running the story. A comment by Slashdot user analog_line…

CC Australia announces: Registration is now officially open for the Creative Commons ‘Building an Australasian Commons’ Conference. The conference will be held on Tuesday 24th June 2008 from 8.30am – 5pm at the State Library of Queensland, South Brisbane, and is proudly supported by Creative Commons Australia, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries…

I hate to beat a dead horse, but the horse’s promoters provide a convenient excuse when they claim the dead horse is making a comeback. The horse in question of course is DRM (emphasis added): “(Recently) I made a list of the 22 ways to sell music, and 20 of them still require DRM,” said…

The language learning website, italki.com, has been around as a social networking site since 2006. Starting in April, they decided to develop a new version of italki: italki Knowledge. italki Knowledge is made up of a bunch of wikis functioning as open textbooks—free for anyone to access and edit. The wikis span a multitude of…

Magnatune, the online record label that has been pioneering open business practices for years, has now launched a subscription service. Read the announcement for lots of interesting information about the service and the business. In other Magnatune news, there’s now a Magnatune plugin for Songbird, a nice addition to those for Amarok and Rhythmbox. It’s…