Last month the Center for Social Media released Untold Stories: Creative Consequences of the Rights Clearance Culture for Documentary Filmmakers. Many of the stories are unfortunately of a familiar type: contemporary documentarians must go through incredible lengths to gain clearance for “culture” in essentially every second of their films. Often clearance means removal when the…

Another cool aspect of the WIRED show last week: Gil and Byrne both played a lot of covers. As Justin Cone’s award-winning Creative Commons film says, “Creativity always builds on the past . . .” Among his originals, Gil also played: –Cambalache (Enrique Santos Discepolo — a dark Argentine tango) –Imagine (John Lennon) –Three Little…

Today the Creative Commons launched a new standalone license, dubbed Developing Nations. The deed lays it out simply: it’s an attribution-only license that applies within developing nations. The legal code defines developing nations as “any nation that is not classified as a ‘high-income economy’ by the World Bank.” which according to the World Bank’s site…

Jessamyn runs librarian.net, a blog exploring issues in library science and within American libraries, and is currently one of the select few webloggers covering the Democratic National Convention . In addition to all her daily posts, her access allows her to share photos from within the convention, and all of it is available for reuse…

People who study race, gender, and anthropology sometimes talk about “code-switching“: the way a person who straddles different cultures (poor and rich, minority and majority, north and south) learns to toggle between the lingo and mannerisms of each to survive, or in some cases, thrive. One of the several “ah ha!” moments of Siva Vaidhyanathan‘s…

Creative Commons board member Joi Ito will address the Flash Forward 2004 conference at the New Yorker Hotel in New York City — tomorrow, Friday July 9th, at 9:00am. Assistant director Neeru Paharia will appear on a panel, “Open Source and Social Action,” at the Awe to Action conference — this Saturday, July 10th, at…

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.…

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…

Last night, after many months of gathering and processing great feedback from all of you, we turned on version 2.0 of the main Creative Commons licenses. The 2.0 licenses are very similar to the 1.0 licenses — in aim, in structure, and, by and large, in the text itself. We’ve included, however, a few key…

“Music for Nothing; Tracks for Free” by Eric Dahl