Creative Commons’ 4th Birthday Party is on December 15th. If you are located in the San Francisco Bay Area come celebrate with the CC SF staff at Songbird, the company that brought you the super cool media player. They have generously offered to host our party. The details: What: Creative Commons Turns Four! When: Friday,…

Creative Commons recently joined the OpenCourseWare Consortium as an Affiliate Organization. The Consortium is a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations who are commited to creating a broad and deep body of open educational content. For more information, visit the Consortium’s site.

LibriVox is a project that describes its mission to be the “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain.” It is a digital library of free public domain audio books that are read and recorded by volunteers. It was started just a year and a half ago, in August 2005, and already has amassed over…

You can catch the new season of the hilarious animated series Odd Job Jack — about a a temp worker’s myriad employment misadventures — on the Comedy Network in Canada. Better yet, make your own version of the hit cartoon! Odd Job Jack’s creators recently launched a site called Free Jack, in which the master…

Scoopt, the world’s first commercial citizen journalism photography agency, has just launched ScooptWords to help bloggers sell their content to newspapers and magazines. Within the Scoopt interface, you can easily add a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license to your blog right alongside a Scoopt commercial badge. Use the CC license to tell people how your work…

Creative Commons has always recommended and used free and open source licenses for software. We have long provided a deed and metadata wrapper for the GPL. Occasionally we’ve highlighted free software that complements CC licensed media, free software that we create, and pragmatic and philosophical correspondences between free software and free culture. Alex, Jon, and…

In my last letter, I described some of the ways CC technologies get integrated into Web 2.0 applications. Many of you wrote that you were surprised by the examples, and were especially excited that the applications reached so broadly internationally. That response has led me to tell a bit more about CC as a global…

OWL multimedia has launched an audio similarity search engine stocked with 10,444 CC-licensed tracks from ccMixter and Magnatune, with many more to come from other CC supporting sound repositories. You can search OWL via search.creativecommons.org but its real power is finding new music through music. The OWL website allows you to choose an mp3 on…

CC board member and Duke law professor Jamie Boyle is serializing his 19 years in progress novel, started “when I was Shakespeare’s lawyer in a televised mock trial in front of three Supreme Court Justices. He was accused of not being the real author of his own works.” Each chapter of The Shakespeare Chronicles is…

It has been suggested that there would be some value in CC entering the field of software licensing. I am skeptical (there are plenty of software licenses) but the explosion of mixed code/content platforms (e.g., Flash) has led me to at least get feedback about the idea. So if you have thoughts about this, I’d…