Jerry Goldman is determined to archive every recorded oral argument and bench statement in the Supreme Court since 1955, when the Court began to tape-record its public proceedings. Goldman, a professor of political science at Northwestern, founded the OYEZ Project in 1989 “to create and share a complete and authoritative archive of Supreme Court audio.”…

The Silicon Valley nonprofit releases South Korean versions of its innovative copyright licenses at the High Court in Seoul. San Francisco, USA and Seoul, SOUTH KOREA, March 21, 2005 – Creative Commons, a non-profit organization that offers free, flexible copyright tools to the general public, today unveiled a localized version of its innovative licensing system…

This news hasn’t exactly been a secret up until now, but it hasn’t been official either. Starting tomorrow, I’ll be hanging up the Creative Commons jersey to start work full-time at Google, as a product advisor and eventually product counsel. Before I go, I have plenty to say about, and many people to thank for,…

Yesterday I had the chance to talk to a workshop the Northern California Association of Law Libraries put on here in San Francisco. Organized by Frances Jones, Director of the California Judicial Center Library (we met back at the American Association of Law Libaries conference in Boston not long ago), the workshop included great talks…

There’s a great (long) New Yorker piece this week covering the world of plagarism, copyright, and sampling. In it, Malcolm Gladwell recounts the story of an earlier article that ended up in a hit Broadway play and how in the end, he didn’t feel cheated but instead felt the playwright had created a new work…

J. LeRoy noticed two hours of audio arguments from Loving v. Virginia (a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case that overturned an anti-interracial marriage law in Virginia) at Oyez, available under a CC license. A couple days ago LeRoy released a remix of the arguments. The real-life contemporary remixreplay of the same arguments is readily apparent.

Last week I gave a talk on the licences and their relationship to the public domain at the ATRIP Conference in Utrecht, Holland. ATRIP is the International Association for the Advancement of Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property. Abraham Drassinower of the University of Toronto Law School gave a fascinating paper dealing with CCH Canadian…

The US Supreme Court is currently hearing Gitmo cases, which involve a review of post-9/11 captures and detainment of suspected al-Qaida and Taliban members. Oyez, the Supreme Court archive has begun posting audio from the hearings, including streaming and downloadable mp3s licensed under Creative Commons.

Oyez, the supreme court audio archive previously featured on this site, has recently released all the audio from the Eldred vs. Ashcroft case. Recorded last Fall, the audio of this case is available under a Creative Commons license. Also featured on that page are SMIL versions of the audio, which display images of the speakers…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit (in California) ruled yesterday that the Beastie Boys’ sampling of a three-note segment of James Newton’s composition to the song “Choir” did not infringe Newton’s copyright. The court ruled that the sample was a “de minimis” — or trivial — instance of copying and thus not…