Downhill Battle and p2pnet have announced a new video contest. The goal is to encourage people to make short movies and animations about the music industry, filesharing, and the potential we have to change the system. The right video can be the best way to explain these issues and get someone involved, and as always…

This week’s featured content is Rick Prelinger‘s new film Panorama Ephemera, produced entirely with short government clips from the 1940s-1970s. For those in the Bay Area, it will be shown at the San Francisco Cinematheque on Sunday, June 13 at 7:30 pm. The clips range from the everyday normal to the absolutely bizarre and together…

Last night, after many months of gathering and processing great feedback from all of you, we turned on version 2.0 of the main Creative Commons licenses. The 2.0 licenses are very similar to the 1.0 licenses — in aim, in structure, and, by and large, in the text itself. We’ve included, however, a few key…

Scott Matthews, of turnstyle web mp3 player fame, has launched a new project called DRUMS. It’s slighty inspired by Creative Commons and the goal is to create a P2P network that is fair to both copyright owners and folks seeking content. If you have something to add to his proposal, pop on over and drop…

You may have noticed some new names on our blog of late. Roland Honekamp, an Internet entrepreneur in Germany, recently joined Creative Commons as Christiane Asschenfeldt‘s right-hand-man at iCommons HQ in Berlin. Heather Ford, a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow here at Stanford, is helping lead iCommons Africa’s development, with a focus on South Africa, her…

Today I had one of the best experiences of my time at Creative Commons, which is saying a lot. I had the pleasure of visiting the Chandler School in Pasadena, CA, USA, to talk about copyright and Creative Commons. Some 200 sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders and I talked about the ins and outs and dos…

Rick Prelinger, of the Prelinger Archives, got his letter to the editor published in today’s New York Times. In it he points to the positive free distribution aspects of digitizing and sharing his works under the public domain: Our experience may seem counterintuitive, but it has been overwhelmingly positive: the more we give away, the…

Squarespace, an easy to use website and blog creation and hosting service, recently made it easy for users to license their content via our remote licesning application. Here’s what Squarespace says within their site management application about Creative Commons: We’ve integrated a utility that lets you generate Creative Commons licenses for your site. A Creative…

dadaIMC, a content management system that offer a codebase for the operation of Independent Media Center sites, now supports Creative Commons licenses for users uploading content to the system. There are currently twenty eight Independent Media Center sites that run on dadaIMC. Independent Media Centers, like the one in Baltimore, are based on a philosophy…

Winksite is a popular mobile blogging application that lets you both post to a blog from your phone or PDA and read other blogs, in addition to a slew of other community tools. They’ve recently added Creative Commons support for blogs hosted on the service, so you can make it clear to readers how your…