A report based on the survey we mentioned in August is now released: The cultural heritage community sits on a goldmine of images, texts, sounds, films, video, data and metadata of immense interest to wide variety of specific sectors and the general public. The resources that these organisations hold increasingly come as digital files and…

In case you hadn’t heard, Lawrence Lessig is officially the most popular guy on the internet (for now)! Check out webcomic xkcd for a great strip featuring Elaine, the “greatest hacker of our era”, learning copyright from CC’s CEO. For added enjoyment, check out a wonderfully lo-fi tribute by SweedishViennese “art-pranksters” Monochrom on BoingBoingTV. That…

Works by the U.S. government are in the public domain, but not necessarily accessible to the public. Carl Malamud’s public.resource.org has heroically worked to rectify this, and recently announced that 1.8 million pages of federal case law, including all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 to the present and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754…

In what seems to becoming a trend, two new academic papers have been made available online that explore the varying implications of Creative Commons in relation to copyright law and culture at large. The first paper, The Creative Commons and Copyright Protection in the Digital Era: Uses of Creative Commons Licenses by Minjeong Kim, examines…

WITNESS, an international human rights organization founded by pop musician Peter Gabriel, announced yesterday the launch of The Hub (Beta), a place for users to view and contribute human rights-related media – a potential “YouTube for Human Rights”. Of note to the CC-community is that The Hub’s users are “advised to publish contents under a…

In looking at CC success stories, we tend to focus on how CC licences have allowed new business models to grow or have helped facilitate new forms of artistic expression. While these are both incredibly important and, in their increasing abundance, popular implementations of what CC can provide, what sometimes gets lost in the shuffle…

Fedora 8 has implemented a great feature within the Firefox browser that makes it even easier for users to find Creative Commons-licensed materials that they can share, remix and reuse. The pull-down menu right below the main search field is a quick way to filter search results to return CC-licensed open content. Congratulations to Fedora…

CC evangelist Cory Doctorow has a new column up on Locus Online discussing “the fundamentals of using CC licenses for people who are interested in the idea but haven’t tried it yet”. The article outlines the different conditions available in any given CC-license, how the licenses are read (machine/human/lawyer), and takes note of the harmony…

Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona will be hosting Spain’s first national netlabel meeting from November 9-10th. Netlabels, the sleek and thriving record labels of the internet, focus on online distribution and promotion for music released primarily under Creative Commons licenses. London and Berlin have already organized great festivals dedicated to CC music and netlabels,…

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been a tremendous supporter of Creative Commons and our new educational division, ccLearn. The foundation’s newsletter just published a great interview with Catherine Casserly, their Program Officer for Open Educational Resources. Here are a couple excerpts: Aren’t copyright laws an obstacle to all of this? Traditionally, they have…