Victor Stone just turned on a very interesting beta statistics page for our music remix site, ccMixter. Some stuff to note: 81% of uploaded a cappella tracks have been remixed (and Victor says that percentage goes way up if you ignore recently uploaded tracks, which remixers haven’t had much time to work with yet). J.Lang,…

Orange is an animated film project in the making to be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license, made with Blender, open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. The producers have put out a call for textures. If you’re a computer artist, accept the challenge. Rotten fish textures…

Noted many places, Linux creator Linux Torvalds has written on using CC to marginalize DRM: Creative Commons licenses already require that you can’t use technological measures to restrict the rigts you give with the CC licenses. The “Share Alike” license in particular requires all work based on it to also be shared alike, ie it…

This year’s Freedom to Creativity festival is underway in Zagreb, Croatia, featuring a lecture by John Wilbanks of Science Commons on “The Impact of Patents and Licensing on the Commons” and free culture performances by artists from Croatia and Serbia and Montenegro. Creative Commons licenses for Croatia were announced at last year’s festival. Happy one…

Last summer, Creative Commons had the pleasure of having Fred Benenson as its first Free Culture intern. Fred was tasked with coming up with interesting or cool ways to get out Creative Commons’ message but on a grass roots level. Fred created a very sexy media kit that Free Culture members can give to bands…

As I procrastinatefinish my slides for a talk on Semantic Search on the Public Web with Creative Commons at the 2006 Semantic Technology Conference (March 6-9, San Jose, California) I note that the closing keynote makes some pretty heady predictions: Markets for semantic technology products and services will grow 10-fold from 2006 to 2010 to…

A few days ago we turned on a completely redesigned public wiki. The main content there now focuses on software developers. Shortly the entire technology section of the CC site will move to the wiki and will no longer be embarrassingly out of date. I want to especially draw attention to our technology challenges page.…

Monday evening I had the pleasure of presenting to the Purdue Linux User Group (PLUG) and Purdue Computing Society in West Lafayette, Indiana. Unlike previous talks I’ve done, this one wasn’t about a specific development I’m working on, but rather an overview of CC and metadata. In particular we had a good discussion about the…

William Patry, a partner at Thelen Reid & Priest, New York City, specializing in copyright trial litigation and appellate advocacy and formerly copyright counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary and also formerly a Policy Planning Advisor to the Register of Copyrights, mused recently on the influence artists feel both from…

So the topic of what constitutes a “noncommercial use” under those Creative Commons licenses that contain the NonCommercial license option has been a perennial source of debate over the years. Shortly after I first started with Creative Commons, I posted an interpretation of “noncommercial” to the cc-education list which was consistent with that community’s understanding…