Former Featured Commoner Beatpick have launched a new website that aims to make it easier to explore their diverse catalog, showcasing improved search features and an easy way to find music to be used in commercial contexts. Of course, their entire catalog remains released broadly under a CC BY-NC-SA license, making it shareable and remixable…

Creative Commons has spent a lot of time over the past year or so strategizing, and worrying, about the current state of the public domain and its future. In particular, we’ve been thinking about ways to help cultivate a vibrant and rich pool of freely available resources accessible to anyone to use for any purpose,…

Talented animator, writer and producer Nina Paley has freely released her animated film, Sita Sings the Blues under our copyleft license, Attribution-ShareAlike. Copies of Paley’s feature length film are available on Archive.org, LegalTorrents, and various other sites in many different formats. Nina explains her decision to her audience on the film’s site: Dear Audience, I…

If you’re in Los Angeles, please consider stopping by the GOOD Space (6824 Melrose Ave., LA, CA 90038) this Wednesday, March 11, at 7pm for an event that GOOD is hosting in conjunction with Knight Pulse called GOOD Community Leaders. Representatives from five social initiatives will offer short presentations about their work and talk about…

The potential migration of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects to using CC BY-SA as their primary content license has spurred some interesting discussions about attribution — how to give credit for a massively collaborative work in a variety of mediums? This question is relevant regardless of migration, but clearly migration has prompted the discussion and…

CASH Music, the CC-friendly non-profit we can’t seem to stop talking about, has teamed up with 50FOOTWAVE to release the band’s entire back-catalog – including a brand new EP Power+Light, prior releases, and various rarities – under a CC BY-NC-SA license. Fronted by songwriter Kristin Hersh, 50FOOTWAVE’s back-catalog is a massive amount of material, now…

In case it weren’t evidenced by their participation in Wikipedia Loves Art, The Brooklyn Museum is an institution that simply “gets it.” On Tuesday, they launched an API. The Brooklyn Museum Collection API consists of a set of methods that return structured data and links to images from the museum’s collections. This is particularly exciting…

As promised in last week’s post on The Commons Video, here’s an interview with David Bollier, author of Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own, which we said in January “will likely establish itself as a definitive guide for those seeking to understand and discover the key players and concepts…

Plutopia has been called the “best SXSW Interactive party to date” and we’re lucky enough to be representing at their 2009 SXSW party. If you’ve got a conference badge you’re free to come, but for every one else, the cover is $10. Check out more details on the Plutopia site or just show up: Monday,…

Net music innovator and philosopher Lucas Gonze (mentioned on this blog many times, e.g., about net native music) writes in about his new thing: Hey CC guys, this is a note to announce that my new app is live. The app: http://freshhotradio.com The FAQ: http://freshhotradio.com/help What’s special about this is that it’s a mainstream-friendly experience…