We are thrilled to announce today that Annette Thomas, CEO of Macmillan Publishers Ltd, has joined the Creative Commons Board of Directors, and that Melanie Cornwell, former Editorial Projects Director of Wired magazine, has joined CC staff as Vice President of Strategy. Annette comes to the Creative Commons Board with many years of experience in…

Vincent Moon by Brantley Gutierrez / CC BY Filmmaker and artist Vincent Moon first gained notoriety with his verité style performance pieces for French music blog La Blogotheque. Over the past five years his creative output has been prolific, releasing music documentaries that range from impromptu performance Take Away Shows to event-based projects like Temporary…

Free Culture X, a conference of Students for Free Culture, will be held February 13th at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Keynote addresses will be given by Harvard Berkman Center co-founder Jonathan Zittrain, the co-founder of the public interest group Public Knowledge, Gigi Sohn, and the director of American University’s Center for Social…

Indaba Music, an international community of musicians, music professionals, and fans exploring the creative possibilities of making music with people in different places, has been up to some pretty impressive stuff since being founded just a few years ago. We’re honored to have Daniel Zaccagnino and Matthew Siegel, the company’s co-Founders, write the fifth letter…

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded today to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson for their research on economic governance. Ostrom’s award is particularly exciting, for it cites her study of the commons. Commons? That sounds familiar! Ostrom’s pioneering work mostly concerns the governance of common-pool resources — resources that are rivalrous (i.e., scarce,…

Used in connection with Creative Commons the word “hybrid” has typically denoted an “economy” or “models” involving both sharing and commerce. Over half of CC founder Lawrence Lessig’s most recent book is devoted to exploring this sort of hybrid — see Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. CC licenses are a…

And we’d like to not think of ourselves as blockheads, either. If you came across Mark Helprin’s bizarre Op-Ed from a couple of weeks ago, you might have caught the legendary novelist playing the guilt-by-association-game by arguing that we’re “antagonistic to the authorial right.” In fact its the “authorial right” that makes CC work —…

Bloomsbury Academic, the recently-launched academic publishing imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, just announced their first series publication, Science, Ethics and Innovation. The series will be edited by Nobel Laureate Sir John Sulston and professor John Harris. The series will be released online as free, CC-licensed downloads with hard copies available for sale. More from The Guardian:…

After discovering the dozens of unauthorized and possibly infringing remix videos that resulted from his adamant calls not to remix his interview with CC founder, Lawrence Lessig, Stephen Colbert is mad. He’s so mad he featured a new segment and music video challenging fans not to remix his show any more. He reiterated this demand…

HarperStudio, an imprint of the world renown publishers Harper Collins, has an interview with Joi Ito, our CEO. In his answers, Joi tackles some of the more complex implications of Creative Commons licensing for media like books: 2) Does Creative Commons have different implications for different forms of media? Would books be affected differently than…