Public broadcasters often ask themselves: how to better enable tax payers to access the works that they have paid for? This was the question that the BBC, the public broadcaster for the United Kingdom, addressed in 2004 during the debate over its charter renewal. The result of their deliberations was a yearlong pilot, the Creative…

Today marks the release of Small Arm of Sea, the debut album by female indietronica singer, songwriter and producer Tone (Sofie Nielsen). While the album itself is unique in its style and substance, seamlessly combining abstract electronic composition techniques with a clear pop sensibility, it is equally as intriguing in terms of distribution. Small Arm…

In our most recent “Featured Commoner” piece, we catch up with musician Monk Turner, who experiments not only with a variety of musical styles but also distribution techniques, having released a slew of concept albums through the internet archive (all CC licensed). His most recent album, Monk Turner’s Calendar, came out this past week and…

Cho PD, one of the most successful professional hip-hop artists in Korea, has just released a track in collaboration with CC Korea. The song made its debut last week at CC Hope Day in Seoul. Jongeun Lee, a volunteer from CC Korea, took up Cho PD’s offer to “Remix this, go ahead,” and produced a…

My name is Mike Shaver, and I’m proud to consider myself a Commoner. I work as the Chief Evangelist at the Mozilla Corporation, a part of the Mozilla Foundation chartered to oversee a project I helped found a decade ago. Mozilla produces world-class open source software, most notably the Firefox web browser, but we also…

December 15, 2007 — San Francisco, CA, USA and Belgrade, Serbia The much-anticipated global celebration of Creative Commons’ fifth year is amplified today with the announcement of the locally ported Creative Commons licensing suite in Serbia. In close collaboration with slobodnakultura.org, Wikimedia Serbia, and New Media center Kuda_org, the Creative Commons Team in Serbia, lead…

Tomorrow (December 15th), Creative Commons will celebrate its fifth birthday here in San Francisco and in cities all over the world, including Bangalore, Beijing, Belgrade, Berlin, Brisbane, Los Angeles, New York, Pasay, and Seoul. The San Francisco party will feature announcements by Joi Ito and Lawrence Lessig, a performance by Gilberto Gil and his son…

Mahalo, the “human powered search engine”, announced this week that they will be integrating CC BY-NC licensing into their search index, making the content reusable for noncommercial purposes. While APIs have often allowed developers access to a website’s back end, Mahalo utilizes more than algorithms to generate their index. Users sift through and moderate search…

Today Yale College announced Open Yale Courses, thereby making a collection of Yale courses freely available online. Along with MIT’s recent announcement, this is fantastic news for the open education movement. “Open Yale Courses,” presents unique access to the full content of a selection of college-level courses and makes them available in various formats, including…

In continuing our Featured Commoner series, we caught up with Alessandro Simonetto, founder of OnClassical, an audio label for classical music that uses CC licensing integrally in its business plan. What’s OnClassical all about? OnClassical is an online label for refined music. The name means both ON(line)CLASSICAL(music) and ON[about]CLASSICAL[music]. I define “classical” in the same…