Be The Media is a book for anyone looking to create, distribute, and engage with digital media. Compiled by David Mathison, the book features articles on how individuals are taking control of their own media production and distribution (Part One: The Personal Media Renaissance) and how communities are developing around these producers to showcase their…

The Creative Commons gratefully acknowledges support on behalf of Lulu.com in the form of a $50,000 annual five-year grant. The grant is from the Beal Fund of the Triangle Community Foundation. This substantial investment demonstrates Lulu’s commitment to participatory culture and we are particularly grateful for it. Lulu was founded in 2002 to empower creators…

The team behind To Shoot An Elephant, the award-winning CC Attribution-Share Alike CC Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike licensed documentary we learned about late last year, are organizing a global screening of the film for Jan 18th, 2010: From the To shoot an elephant team we are calling on any individual, group or collective to organise a screening…

The University of Amsterdam will present CC founder Lawrence Lessig with an honorary doctorate for his scholarship in cyberlaw and his advocacy to design a standard for open content licenses, Creative Commons. Prof. Bernt Hugenholtz of the Institute for Information Law (IvIR) will confer the degree on Prof. Lessig this Friday, Jan. 8. The following…

The First Annual World’s Fair Use Day (WFUD) will be held on Tuesday January 12, 2010 in Washington, D.C. (with events kicking off Monday night). WFUD is being organized by Public Knowledge, and will bring together a wide variety of individuals and groups interested in fair use, including artists, scholars, policymakers, entrepreneurs, media professionals, and consumer…

Creative Commons has been celebrating Public Domain Day – January 1st – for several years, alongside many others who are similarly passionate about the value of the public domain and the need to prevent its demise. Each year on this day, copyright protection expires for millions of creative works, allowing those works to be used, repurposed…

We launched our fifth year-end campaign on October 5 in a very difficult economic environment. Today, the final day of the year, the decade, and last scheduled day of the campaign, we surpassed our goal of raising $500,000. Three major contributions in the last 24 hours carried us over the top from our board member…

From a “Happy Birthday” rendition in Korean to apple schnapps in Reykjavik and a Free Culture debate in Poland, Creative Commons’ seventh birthday was celebrated this month with originality and cheerful camaraderie. The global parties kicked off in Beijing at the opening of “Remix and Share”, a contemporary art exhibition featuring 60 acclaimed artists across…

Though our 2009 Commoner Letter series has officially come to an end, we are pleased to announce one final letter, this time from our Founder and Board Member Lawrence Lessig. Professor Lessig needs little introduction, so I’ll leave it to him tell you in his own words why supporting the mission of Creative Commons is…

Photo by Mark Surman CC BY-NC-SA For those of you who don’t know Karien Bezuidenhout, she is the Chief Operating Officer at the Shuttleworth Foundation, one of the few foundations that fund open education projects and who have an open licensing policy for their grantees. A couple months ago, I had the chance to meet…