Magnatune provides “Internet music without the guilt.” Based in Berkeley, California, Magnatune is a record label with a 21st Century business model, offering consumers a unique mix of free and paid music. One of the first for-profit companies to adopt Creative Commons’ copyright licenses into its strategy, Magnatune has amassed both an impressive buzz and…

Over the last few days, I had the honor of attending the Creative Commons Australia launch which was celebrated by a two-day Creative Commons conference at the Queensland University of Technology Law School. The conference, entitled Open Content Licensing (OCL): Cultivating the Creative Commons, was well attended by many of Australia’s influencial thinkers in government,…

Juan Carlos De Martin writes in with a report on last month’s Creative Commons Italy launch: The Italian CC Licenses were launched in Turin on December 16th, with a conference at the Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli. Over 100 people crowded the attractive conference room of the Fondazione, with several journalists in attendance to cover the event.…

Last year, Creative Commons was awarded the Golden Nica by the organizers of the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. Some great pictures conveying a sense of the award ceremony’s atmosphere have been put online and can be found here. There are also some webcasts of CC contributions to the Austrian launch conference (by Joi…

MIT Technology Review just published an article that nicely ties together three related news items: IBM’s release of 500 patents for use in open source developments, Bill Gates’s “communist” screed, and Science Commons. The article misleads on one point: The Creative Commons licenses allow writers, artists and musicians to put their work into the public…

Tomislav Medak writes in: To promote free/open content production and to mark the official launch of Croatian Creative Commons licenses (Jan 14, 19.00 CET), the Multimedia Institute is organizing a free culture festival that will include: 1) an exhibition presenting public domain resources and featuring free content producing audio and video artists, 2) a number…

The New York Times continues to write about mash-ups as if they just discovered them. Today a sidebar outlining the history of sampling and mash-ups appears in the Week in Review. Conspicuously missing: The WIRED CD and the current “Fine Art of Sampling” contest. (Negativland gets a mention, though.)

In a long article on piracy and the Chinese economy, the New York Times Magazine’s Ted C. Fishman describes Toyota’s judo-like approach to piracy: don’t fight overwhelming forces head-on; use their momentum to your advantage . . . Another approach to the Chinese intellectual-property regime is to leverage its vitality. The Japanese may be showing…

Katie Dean of Wired News has a story about the general response to Bill Gates’s casual lobbing of the word “communist” in the general direction of anyone who thinks critically about how the law regulates information. The story quotes part of my response to Gates; I thought I’d print the rest of it here. (Dean…

Read Hugh MacLeod’s How to Be Creative now. Nearly any sentence could be lifted as a pull quote, so I won’t bother lifting any. Only fifty pages, super easy to read ebook formatting, great cartoons, tremendous relevance to creating free culture while surviving and thriving, and it’s CC licensed. Also check out the few dozen…