In the world of weblogs, we’ve noticed a couple notable recent adopters of Creative Commons licenses. Jon Johansen, the teenage hacker that famously cracked DVD encryption so he could watch a movie he purchased on his computer, started a blog called “So Sue Me.” He was recently acquitted of charges he did anything wrong. A…

Mike Meyers, star of the popular Austin Powers series, has just scored an unusual movie deal with Dreamworks that will allow him to make films from sampling earlier movies. DreamWorks will acquire the necessary rights so the actor can be digitally inserted in the old flicks. Today, people practicing in music and movie “mash-ups” are…

As we reported last month when it was first announced, the new version of Movable Type, a popular application for managing weblogs, was released today with full support for adding a Creative Commons license to your website. If you have a weblog, or are thinking about starting one, you might want to check out the…

“Some Rights Reserved,” by Gary Stix

There’s a great piece about Creative Commons in the March issue of Scientific American. You may remember that Scientific American recently named our chairman Lawrence Lessig one of the 50 top innovators of 2002.

Free trading of our music has genuine, verifiable returns. Community. Exchanges of artistic thought and aesthetic commodity. . . The RIAA argument that artists won’t particpate in the marketplace of ideas without financial compensation for CDs seems pretty short-sighted from where we sit. — Chris Wetherell, Dealership We recently sat down for an interview with…

There’s been a lot of recent talk among weblogs regarding Creative Commons licenses. After a little healthy back-and-froth, Copyfight cleared up some confusion over its use of a Creative Commons license. Doc (whom we profiled on this site) recently changed his blog to devote the contents to the public domain, sparking a discussion among a…

In Japan, a project called the “Intellectual Property Outline” started in July 2002 and includes some provisions that seek to accomplish many of the same goals as the Creative Commons. While it is clear they were not influenced by us directly, it’s interesting to watch the convergence of alternate forms of copyright come from governments…

Cory Doctorow, our current featured commoner, is interviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle‘s SFGate.

Public Campaign, a campaign-finance reform advocacy group, made its “State of the Union” poster available under a Creative Commons license on its website today. The image features the president of the United States making a State of the Union address — not to the houses of Congress, but to the trading floors of a stock…