An NYT story on classical and rock guitar players posting versions of 17th century chamber piece Pachelbel’s Canon to YouTube demonstrates the value of public domain materials and web-based collaboration: This process of influence, imitation and inspiration may bedevil the those who despair at the future of copyright but is heartening to connoisseurs of classical…

CC licensing commercials, at least under a restrictive Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, seems like a no-brainer (adverisers should want their message spread as much as possible) and allowing derivatives not much of a stretch (going “viral” and all that), but not many have taken these steps. Now multimedia pioneer Marc Canter has published a commercial for his…

The New York Times has a story on LibriVox, a community of 1,800 volunteers reading out of copyright books and releasing them as public domain audiobooks. We mentioned LibriVox’s one year birthday earlier this month. The Times article mentions two more audiobook projects using public domain books: Literal Systems, which releases recordings under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs terms,…

San Francisco, CA, USA; Berlin, GERMANY; and Bogotá, Colombia — August 22, 2006 — Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to building a body of creative work free to share and build upon today announced the launch of its licenses in Colombia. Creative Commons copyright licenses are available free of charge from the group’s website. The…

Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig received a standing ovation for his LinuxWorld San Francisco keynote today on free culture and free software. Some press coverage: VNUNet News.com SecurityFocus Red Herring Internetnews.com PodTech (keynote audio) If you’re at LinuxWorld be sure to stop by the Creative Commons booth, say hello to CC staff and volunteers, and…

Ward Cunningham, creator of the first wiki, interviewed in Application Development Trends: The Creative Commons Attribution license is the “technology” we need to save patterns. If we’d known this 15 years ago we would not be in the mess we find ourselves in today. Instead creative individuals would be retelling the patterns in a way…

Why version 3.0? As was mentioned a little while ago, we are looking to move ahead with versioning the CC licenses up to version 3.0 to improve the clarity of the terms of the licenses and to address some concerns of one of our first and very prominent license adopters — MIT, with their OpenCourseWare…

If you want an inside track on the future of free content licenses you could hardly do better than watch or listen to recordings of two Wikimania sessions — Lawrence Lessig on The Ethics of the Free Culture Movement (particularly the last twenty minutes) and Eben Moglen on Document Licenses and the Future of Free…

MCM, who last month published a DRM fable for children has published The Crow Who Could Fly, a patent fable for children, under the CC Attribution-ShareAlike license. German and Hungarian translations have already been published, with Chinese underway. There’s now an effort to turn MCM’s The Pig and the Box into a movie. If that…

Gratisvibes is a newish blog reviewing and recommending CC licensed electronic music: Gratisvibes aims to lead readers to the best of Creative Commons-licensed Electronic Music on the web, spreading the word for greater musical freedom for both artists and listeners alike. ccMixter star teru has a new remix project, ccMusictime: The following mixes were made…