If you’re in Los Angeles, you might want to check out Chairman of the Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig, along with former recording industry head Hilary Rosen tonight and tomorrow at USC’s Bovard Auditorium. Tickets are $10, and Creative Commons will be there giving out information and licensed music CDs (more about the CDs shortly).

Gnomoradio is a new project to create a free software package that will allow people to share Creative Commons licensed audio. While there are no downloadable clients currently, the project is proceeding rapidly and they have put a call out for musicians wanting to release their licensed music to the network.

Streaming Media’s recent article “Creative Commons Licensing for Digital Media” is a detailed review and demonstration of our metadata embedding guidelines. Larry Bouthillier covers why the licenses exist, the license terms themselves, and how to apply them to web pages and music formats.

Inspired by world-famous musician and composer Gilberto Gil and developed with the help of the veteran found-art group Negativland, Creative Commons will launch our new Sampling Licenses on December 16, 2003. Read more.

There’s a great article by Tad Friend in this week’s New Yorker, entitled “Credit Grab.” The piece explains the (fairly arbitrary) arbitration process used to settle authorship disputes over big Hollywood movies and to award credit to screenwriters. The process is a mess, says Friend, in part because

most Hollywood pictures, particularly those whose characters are given out in rubberized form in conjunction with the purchase of Happy Meals, have no particular author. They emerge out of market research and dovetail with the storytelling expectations of the wider commercial culture . . . .

Just one of many nuggets in this piece, which sadly, is only available in print. But film fans and copyright buffs will find the New Yorker‘s Oct. 20 issue well worth the four bucks: it’s one story or comic after another about the fascinating, surreal world of commercialized culture. (A representative cartoon caption: “That thing you just said — I’d like to option it for a movie.”)

We recently sat down with Michael Eisen from the Public Library of Science to talk about why they started their organization and why they adopted our licenses for their publications.

This week’s featured content of the week is the combination photoblog/weblog of Jose Luis. In addition to his sharp design and observations of life in the Bay Area, we couldn’t help but notice the breath-taking photos that accompany each entry. It’s hard to pick a favorite, as they are so many amazing shots, and they’re all available under a Creative Commons license.

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) has just published their innagural issue of peer-reviewed articles, all released freely under a Creative Commons license.

The articles focus on all aspects of biology, and the aims and goals of the publication are outlined in their introductory piece. The first issue also features an essay by our Executive Director, Glenn Otis Brown, on Creative Commons and how copyright and science can evolve in the future.

Youth Media Distribution is a project that aims to improve the distribution of independent youth created film, video, radio and new media. They offer a variety of tools for young people making films, including hosting on their site and promotion through film festivals. Recently they’ve added the option of choosing a Creative Commons license when uploading a film. They’ve even created a special page listing all the entries released under a license,

The YMDI project is an offshot of MediaRights.org, a non-profit organization that helps people locate and use documentary films that focus on social issues.

We were impressed to see the Charleston Post and Courier story on the basics of copyright and illegal downloading mention quite clearly Creative Commons and how it works. We were equally impressed by the long-running newsletter TidBITS and their recent decision to release their publication under a license. They describe the process in which they arrived at the license choice — that they basically allowed the same use a license covered, realized the importance of the licenses, and decided to apply it to solidify their policies.