The Eduserv Foundation is funding an important study on the use of open licensing at cultural heritage institutions in the UK: A study titled “The Common Information Environment and Creative Commons” was funded by Becta, the British Library, DfES, JISC and the MLA on behalf of the Common Information Environment. The work was carried out…

Jon Evans, author of the Arthur Ellis Award winning novel Dark Places (Trail Of The Dead in the UK), is serializing his latest novel, Beasts of New York, online under a CC BY-NC-ND licence. Described by Evans as a “children’s book for adults”, Beasts of New York represents a shift for Evans, who is known…

Copyright scholar Pamela Samuelson has published a very readable call to begin thinking about comprehensive copyright reform in the form of a model law. Those familiar with Creative Commons will recognize that rationale for and obstacles to reform at the government level demonstrate the critical role played by Creative Commons. Samuelson on part of the…

If you been looking for some new music to sing along to lately, make sure to check out the wonderful “Chocolate Rain” by Tay Zonday. A catchy tune to say the least, Zonday released “Chocolate Rain” on to YouTube under a CC BY-NC-ND licence and has since seen his video reach over 2.5 million views…

Magnatune, a record label that uses a CC BY-NC-SA license for all releases (Magnatune founder John Buckman is also on the CC board), has just hired free software developer Nikolaj Hald Nielsen to work on Amarok, a free software media player. While software and services companies for years have hired many free software developers to…

San Francisco, CA – July 30, 2007 – Today, Creative Commons published the first public release of its desktop licensing library, Liblicense, featuring desktop integration. When content authors grant permission for re-use of their work, Liblicense provides software developers with the ability to easily discover and display those permissions to a user. Liblicense also offers…

Hi, I’m Scott Shawcroft a Creative Commons technical intern and a student at the University of Washington. I’d like to tell you about my project but will start with a bit of a preface. Sorry its long, I’m excited. I’ve been a fan of Creative Commons for a few years now. I watched the original…

We had a great time at OSCON last week – Nathan Yergler, CTO, and Jon Phillips, Business + Community Developer, gave two presentations on CC and the open source community while Mozilla and CC held a party to the jams of the one and only Menomena. Although somewhat delayed, here is a nice digital trail…

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) announced this past week the launch of the first annual SPARC Discovery Awards, a “contest to promote the open exchange of information”. The theme of this year’s contest, Mind Mashup, calls on entrants to illustrate in a short video the importance of sharing ideas and information of…

Strange Horizons, a speculative-fiction webzine that publishes short fiction, poetry, reviews and articles on a weekly basis, have recently added an option allowing authors to publish their works under a CC license. Many authors have taken them up on the offer, including Ben Rosenbaum, whose desire to release his Hugo-nominated “The House Beyond Your Sky”…