“New copyright grants artists greater license” by Jennifer L. Schenker

The writings of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg may be amongst the most important in the 20th Century but it’s the sound of Burroughs’ growl and the haunting lilt in Ginsberg’s recitals that have compelled turntablists to use samples of their speaking voices. Sampling pioneers and Ninjatune entrepreneurs Jonathan More and Matt Black (a.k.a.…

Creative Commons, a non-profit organization seeking to promote the sharing of high-quality content, today introduced its highly innovative licensing system for copyrighted material to Germany. Palo Alto, USA, and Berlin, GERMANY. Creative Commons, a non-profit organization seeking to promote the sharing of high-quality content, today introduced its highly innovative licensing system for copyrighted digital material…

Following many requests on cc-licenses for a list with a more general charter, we’ve created cc-community. If you have a burning question or discussion point related to Creative Commons that doesn’t seem to fit the specific description of any of our many discussion lists, hold back no longer. Subscribe to cc-community. Read the cc-community archives.…

One of the kings of scientific publishing, the journal Nature, has recently launched a forum to bring together articles and information about open access publishing. They’ve even got an RSS feed for updates to the forum. It’s great to see a top journal open a dialogue about a somewhat controversial issue in the scientific publishing…

“Go ahead. Share.” by Joan Anderman

The NY Times has an interesting story of a new movie project called Wizard People, Dear Reader. It’s a derivative work where the first Harry Potter movie plays while artist Brad Neely creates his own soundtrack to the film. It falls into a gray area of law and Warner Brothers declined to comment on it.…

A few more words about the iCommons Brazil launch. It is hard to do the event justice. It was completely overwhelming, a true celebration, and we’ve only now recovered from the whole thing and regrouped. As you know, iCommons Brazil made its debut at the 5th Annual Software Livre conference in Porto Alegre. An afternoon…

Stay Free Magazine has a great interview with Chuck D and Hank Shocklee from Public Enemy. In it, they discuss how lax copyright laws of the late 1980s allowed them to produce thickly sampled songs for their first two major label releases. “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” and “Fear of…

In about an hour the official launch celebration of Creative Commons Brazil will begin. Neeru and I are here at the 5th Annual Software Livre conference in Porto Alegre with the iCommons Brazil team from Rio’s FGV Law School, as well as William Fisher, faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center. Our chairman, Lawrence…