Maarten Sneep has created a pdflatex macro for embedding XMP in PDF files generated from LaTeX source, the de facto standard for scientific documents. As Maarten’s documentation points out, one may obtain XMP suitable for embedding via choose license process. We have a tech challenge calling for Creative Commons and XMP support in open source…

The Center for Cooperative Research is building a database application which will allow the public to conduct grassroots investigations, and participate in the documentation of public historical records by contributing data to their history engine. All the entries will be under an Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license.

Our most prolific technical volunteer (soon to join the CC staff, more on that shortly) strikes again with a cute hack — ccSaver, a screensaver for Linux and Windows that displays random CC-licensed images from OpenPhoto.net at times when your display really ought to power down, but you want eye candy instead. This development merits…

We were honored to get this letter, and a check, from the recently married Joanna and Jaroslaw, of Warsaw, Poland: We (Joanna and Jaroslaw) had decided, that during our wedding we want people to donate for charity instead of buying flowers, and as people somehow connected with copyleft/free_content movement we have chosen CC as a…

FAIRCOPY has developed an innovative way for musicians to distribute their content over P2P networks and get paid. They’ve also built in a way for fans to leverage the power of P2P to resdistribute their favorite FAIRCOPY artists, and make a commission. Musicians can also offer free samples of their work under Creative Commons licenses.

The Wizards of os conference in Berlin proved a veritable feast for Creative Commoners around the world gathering to discuss the future of the digital commons last week. Creative Commons Germany was launched on Friday with an emotional tribute by filmmaker, Michael Grob, who released his full-length feature film, CH7 under a CC license. Along…

The International Herald Tribune has a nice story on the explosive growth of iCommons, with a focus on the recent launch in Germany. The Register UK also has a nice piece. Hats off to Christiane Asschenfeldt, Roland Honekamp, and the many iCommons project leads for the recent boom. More to come.

The New York Times has a great story about the painful process a college professor went through to clear the rights for a short, informative video to be given to incoming students: “It’s crazy,” Professor Turow said of the labyrinth of permissions, waivers and fees he navigated to get the roughly three minutes of video…

Downhill Battle and p2pnet have announced a new video contest. The goal is to encourage people to make short movies and animations about the music industry, filesharing, and the potential we have to change the system. The right video can be the best way to explain these issues and get someone involved, and as always…

Several months ago, Apple released the music software Garageband, allowing anyone with a mac to make some music. Soon after the release, community websites sprang up to allow Garageband users to share music with each other, and build songs together. This is a perfect use for Creative Commons licenses, and earlier we noted that the…