A new web-based experiment is being undertaken by Creative Commons’ Chairman, Lawrence Lessig. In 1999, Professor Lessig wrote Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. After five years in print and five years of changes in law, technology, and the context in which they reside, he realized that Code needed an update, so he opened it…

It recently has come to our attention and that the American Bar Association has Creative Commons licensed essays on the USA PATRIOT provisions. What better a compliment than to have this prestigious association of lawyers use Creative Commons licenses for their content. We’re truly honored.

Folks love a license distribution breakdown, so here’s another, this from the current index of 1.2 million pages (larger crawls forthcoming) used by the Creative Commons search engine: Allows commercial use Allows derivative works Allows both Audio 32 78 32 Image 19 48 16 Interactive 31 65 27 Text 28 69 23 Video 13 65…

The developers of the amaroK media player for KDE have used the tracks from the WIRED CD as content for their demo Live CD. Boot the CD in a PC and you can try out armaroK with zero installation. Great idea. USB memory and hardware media player vendors take note — you can ship your…

Kevin Marks mentioned on the cc-metadata list that you can query Technorati for a list of recently syndicated content, grouped by Creative Commons license. You can also drill down and get a list of recently syndicated content under a specific Creative Commons license. The results are a bit rough now, but one can easily imagine…

I’ll be on a panel on Digital Rights Management tomorrow at high noon at the Sundance Film Festival. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a key issue for any company that controls content or has a library it wants to exploit. Balancing issues of copyright/privacy versus profit is no small challenge. In the new digital age,…

Over the last few days, I had the honor of attending the Creative Commons Australia launch which was celebrated by a two-day Creative Commons conference at the Queensland University of Technology Law School. The conference, entitled Open Content Licensing (OCL): Cultivating the Creative Commons, was well attended by many of Australia’s influencial thinkers in government,…

Tomislav Medak writes in: To promote free/open content production and to mark the official launch of Croatian Creative Commons licenses (Jan 14, 19.00 CET), the Multimedia Institute is organizing a free culture festival that will include: 1) an exhibition presenting public domain resources and featuring free content producing audio and video artists, 2) a number…

In the last New Yorker issue of 2004 (I’m doing some catch-up reading), Ben McGrath has a fun Talk of the Town piece on Caleb Smith, a guy who walked every street on the island of Manhattan over the last year and a half. The end of the piece mentions Mike Epstein, of the excellent…

Read Hugh MacLeod’s How to Be Creative now. Nearly any sentence could be lifted as a pull quote, so I won’t bother lifting any. Only fifty pages, super easy to read ebook formatting, great cartoons, tremendous relevance to creating free culture while surviving and thriving, and it’s CC licensed. Also check out the few dozen…