Inspired by the SXSW Big Bag Competition, iCommons and Creative Commons announce a contest to design this year’s iCommons Summit bag. With the theme of this year’s event: ‘Towards a Global Digital Information Commons’ and workshops on open creativity, knowledge, science and innovation, we’re looking for designs that are creative, visually arresting and informative. The…

In the software world, the concepts of “free software” and “open source” have defined meanings. With the development of licenses governing content, the terms “free content” and “open content” have become commonly used but without clear definitions. An initiative has been started by Erik Möller and Benjamin Mako Hill to define what “free content” or…

Earth Trends, a project of the World Resources Initiative, has just announced that it has opted to license much of the content at its site under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Earth Trends “is a comprehensive online database, maintained by the World Resources Institute, that focuses on the environmental, social, and economic trends that shape…

April 26, 2006 has been designated by WIPO member states as “World IP Day.” The aim of the day is to “to raise awareness of the role of intellectual property in our daily lives, and to celebrate the contribution made by innovators and artists to the development of societies across the globe.” The theme of…

The European Commission is investigating a digital libraries initiative that “aims at making European information resources easier and more interesting to use in an online environment.” As part of a background paper, the Commission discussed the range of technical, legal, operational and financial challenges such an initiative would encounter and specifically noted that Creative Commons…