We’re honored to announce that Joi Ito, venture capitalist, blogger, and tech Renaissance man, has joined our Board of Directors. Ito is the founder and CEO of Neoteny, a venture capital firm, and has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage, and Infoseek Japan. In 1997 Time ranked him as a member of…

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos recently gave NPR listeners a recommendation for summer reading: the Creative Commons-licensed novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow. (Bezos also gave a nod to The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro.) Buy the book, or download it for free — thanks to Cory’s vision and…

Aimee Deep, otherwise known as Aimster, has created a special incentive for people to sign the Reclaim the Public Domain Petition.

Finland is the first country to take part in iCommons, our project to port the lawyer-readable versions of our licenses for use across the world. The Helsinki Institute for Information Technology has produced a first draft of the Finnish licenses and will lead the process from a public discussion list hosted on our site. The…

The highlight reel from the first week of the Sampling License discussion: Sarah Brown raised concerns that the draft language wasn’t clear enough about the copyrightability of sample-derived works and what other rights the sampler enjoys in them. She suggested we address these issues more explicitly. Cathy Kirkman, however, explained why the license itself need…