You may have read this Featured Commoner’s technology columns in the San Jose Mercury Sun News or on Sillicon Valley.com. Dan Gillmor has been writing about technology, business, and policy for as long as such a beat has existed. His new book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, tells the…

Mark Watson is an accomplished programmer and writer of thirteen books on various technical topics. An expert in artificial intelligence and language processing, Watson has advised the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and is currently developing KnowledgeBooks, an information management tool. Recently, Watson released two books, Practical Artificial Intelligence Programming in Java and Loving Lisp,…

Ryan Junell, who animated our Get Creative and Reticulum Rex videos is now spearheading a Slow Motion Video contest. You too can create “a video experience that isn’t afraid to put a 78 record on at 33 1/3rd and kick back in a beanbag to ponder the mysteries of space and time.” Here’s how. All…

The comments period announced here for the minor tweak to the attribution language across all of our core licenses proposed for version 2.5 is drawing to a close. As befits a minor tweak, there has not been a tremendous amount of criticism or issues raised with the revised suggested language. Some important comments, however, raised…

Pittsburgh based label Big Sonic Recordings has released its catalog under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license. At Big Sonic Recordings, you’ll notice that all of our artists give away all of their music for free, and every artist has an online store full of merchandise that you can purchase if you wish to support them.…

Los Angeles-based soul band Simple Flower has released the source tracks for their song Flowers and Pain under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. They’re also offering to host remixes. Give it a shot!

I recently ran across Doctor Paradox (a.k.a. Barb). She creates very funky, fun, and creative sample-loop-based music using Ableton Live and other tools for the Mac. I recently spoke with her about CC licensing, found art in remixes, and music in general. Apparently I caught her in the middle of reading Larry Lessig’s The Future…

Lisa Rein is one of the earliest adopters of Creative Commons. Wander is one of my favorite CC licensed songs and is licensed under an Attribution license — free to copy, remix, or even synch to a movie, as long as you give Lisa attribution.

Filmmaker Andy Pavis has made an eight-minute-long public service announcement about Creative Commons and our mission, entitled Some Rights Reserved. Andy cleverly frames the copyright debate between two extremes in the context of a talk show hosted by “Larry Commons.” The PSA then explores an example of Aaron, a musician who goes through the process…

The Textmapping Project is a site aiming to improve reading comprehension by providing tutorials for teachers, homeschoolers, and education researchers. The practice of textmapping involves creating large scrolls containing information. Information presented in this way allows students to get an idea of the “big picture” and helps them figure out ways of gleaning relevant information…