I’ve been thinking a lot about transaction costs lately, and how they’re at the core of what Creative Commons tries help the world with. By giving permission in advance by using a CC license and metadata, creators can lower the transaction costs of distributing their work. Aliza Sherman relates a story over at WebWorkerDaily that…

Today is Software Freedom Day, a worldwide celebration of free and open source software. See our post on SFD2007. For context on Creative Commons and software freedom, see these slides on free culture and free software (pdf) (I’ll be giving an updated version of this talk at FSCONS next month), our recent post wishing happy…

Blogger and Director of Content Development @ blip.tv, Eric Mortensen, does a fantastic job of curating high resolution Creative Commons licensed photos. He uses Flickr’s ‘Favorite‘ function in an innovative way — all the work he favorites gets pushed to a RSS feed that you can subscribe to. Here’s a clip of the gallery he’s…

Sylvan Sunset | Scott Carpenter CC BY It certainly isn’t the most publicized use of CC licences we have seen, but Scott Carpenter’s “Slyvan Sunset” appearing on the cover of the 2008/2009 Rapid City/Gillete Phone Book has us ecstatic nonetheless. While big names help gain wider exposure for CC, it is important to remember that…

The most frequently used audio and video formats on the web are not open (they’re software patent encumbered), which has hindered the development of free and open source media tools. Open audio and video formats face a tough chicken and egg problem: not interesting to publishers if not supported in software, and not interesting to…

The JISC CETIS (JISC Centre for Educational Technology & Interoperability Standards) is a JISC funded service that has long been researching educational technology and covering the field’s latest developments under a CC BY-NC-SA license. One of their latest publications is a briefing paper on open educational resources (OER) titled, “Open Educational Resources — Opportunities and…

Three excellent commons themed events will occur in northern Europe October 20-26 with no days between them! Each has a significantly different focus. All are highly recommended and will feature participants, speakers, and organizers from Creative Commons’ network throughout Europe and the U.S. First comes the 3rd COMMUNIA Workshop, October 20-21 in Amsterdam. A workshop,…

Yesterday RDFa reached Proposed Recommendation status at the World Wide Web Consortium, the final stage before becoming a W3C Recommendation. Using RDFa, one can make data in web pages rendered for humans also readable in a meaningful way by computers. This is important to Creative Commons, as we have always seen the promise of the…

Bloomsbury Publishing, one of Europe’s leading independent publishing houses (you may have heard of their fiction series Harry Potter, among other fantastic fiction and non-fiction titles) announced today that it is launching an CC-exclusive publishing imprint called Bloomsbury Academic: All books will be made available free of charge online, with free downloads, for non-commercial purposes…

Creative Commons is working with ISOC-Bulgaria to create Bulgaria jurisdiction-specific licenses from the generic Creative Commons licenses. CCi Bulgaria List Project Lead: Veni Markovski and Dragoslava Greve License draft (PDF). English explanation of substantive legal changes. (PDF) Subscribe to the discussion. More about ISOC-Bulgaria Founded in 1995, among its main aims is support free and…