In the software world, the concepts of “free software” and “open source” have defined meanings. With the development of licenses governing content, the terms “free content” and “open content” have become commonly used but without clear definitions. An initiative has been started by Erik Möller and Benjamin Mako Hill to define what “free content” or…

Earth Trends, a project of the World Resources Initiative, has just announced that it has opted to license much of the content at its site under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Earth Trends “is a comprehensive online database, maintained by the World Resources Institute, that focuses on the environmental, social, and economic trends that shape…

Last November Steve Jurveston documented use of one of his photos on the Charlie Rose Show in accordance with the CC Attribution license used for the photo. Now Jurveston writes that some of his photos on Flickr have been used in a travel guide: When I started posting photos on flickr, I never thought they’d…

Gonzo SF novelist John Sundman was an early adopter of Creative Commons and of publishing books on the web before Creative Commons existed. About three years ago I read his first two books, Acts of the Apostles and Cheap Complex Devices (both highly recommended) and intended to interview him shortly after. The interview didn’t happen…

As previously announced Creative Commons is participating in Google’s Summer of Code as a mentoring organization. Please visit our summer of code ideas page and if you’re a student, start working on a proposal. An over-the-top ideal proposal would include support for RDFa, remixing, open formats and affordances for educational and worldwide (not just wealthy…

April 26, 2006 has been designated by WIPO member states as “World IP Day.” The aim of the day is to “to raise awareness of the role of intellectual property in our daily lives, and to celebrate the contribution made by innovators and artists to the development of societies across the globe.” The theme of…

The European Commission is investigating a digital libraries initiative that “aims at making European information resources easier and more interesting to use in an online environment.” As part of a background paper, the Commission discussed the range of technical, legal, operational and financial challenges such an initiative would encounter and specifically noted that Creative Commons…

So the the American Institute of Graphics Arts (AIGA for short) and the U.S. Department of Transportation released a set of 50 universal symbols “copyright-free” online. The symbols are “designed for use at the crossroads of modern life: in airports and other transportation hubs and at large international events.” They are intended to be clearly…

Wikitravel and World66, two user generated content travel sites each using the same Creative Commons license (Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0) have been acquired by Internet Brands, the operator of carsdirect.com and many other .com properties. It’s great to see Internet Brands’ confidence in a business built on CC-licensed content, particularly under a BY-SA license, which permits forking,…