Randy Chertkow and Jason Feehan are true polymaths – founders of the pop band Beatnik Turtle, authors of The Indie Band Survival Guide, and a computer engineer and attorney respectively, they continuously have their hands in a bevy of different projects. Their most recent project, the wide publication of The Indie Band Survival Guide –…

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…

Creative Commons uses Semantic Media Wiki for both our external wiki and our internal task and project management system. As opposed to a normal wiki where text is “flat”, the text and data inside a SMW can be structured in sophisticated ways that allow for meaningful querying of knowledge statements of the corpus. To give a…

Donna Wentworth writes over at the Science Commons blog … Big news:  Microsoft Research has unveiled new add-ins for some of the most popular Microsoft products to make them more useful for the scientific community — including tools for creating, sharing and preserving research in the formats used by scientific publishers and digital archives. The…

Poster by Blender Foundation, CC BY 3.0 Over the past few months several of us at Creative Commons have been collaborating with our colleagues at Creative Commons Australia to create a collaborative system for promoting the great CC stories that will help the world understand how great Creative Commons licenses are for creative works. To…

Lingro is a project that aims to create an online environment that will allow anyone, in reading a foreign language website, a quick and easy means to translate words they don’t understand. Simple in concept, yet profound in implication, Lingro (which we have blogged about twice before) uses open dictionaries and user-submitted, CC BY-SA licensed,…

Thanks to The Wired Campus, I recently stumbled across this new wiki whilst looking for a visualization tool for a ccLearn research project. The new wiki is called Digital Research Tools, also known as DiRT. DiRT is edited by a team of librarians from Rice University’s Digital Media Center and Sam Houston State University’s Newton…

      We’re always trying to make Creative Commons licenses easier to understand and use. From the get-go, human-readable copyright licenses have been a CC mainstay. Creative Commons is excited to announce the expansion of a documentation project that explains various facets of Creative Commons licensing. From the press release: The initiative includes links and PDF…

San Francisco, CA, USA — March 24, 2008 Creative Commons today announced the expansion of a documentation project to explain various facets of Creative Commons licensing. The initiative includes links and PDF downloads to information on critical CC specifications, recommendations, research studies and tutorials. Some of the topics covered include the CC+ and CC0 projects,…

DRM (Digital Rights Management, pejoratively known as Digital Restrictions Management) is said to be defective by design — making digital devices and content more annoying, less secure, less compatible, and generally less useful, and especially where protected by recent legislation, in conflict with free speech. If this dysfunction is not included by design, it is…