Powerful recommendations were made by a recent report entitled “The Common Information Environment and Creative Commons,” released on October 10, 2005. The report was commissioned by a group of key public sector bodies in the United Kingdom including the British Library, the Department for Education & Skills, the Museums Libraries & Archives Council, the National…

So I’m sure we’ve all heard the refrain that free and open content licensing impoverishes artists and creators even further and/or is the bastion of those who don’t want to make money from their creativity. While there have been several examples already that disprove these contentions, a new wiki has been established to build an…

[This email is part of a weekly series written by Lawrence Lessig and others about the history and future of Creative Commons.] CC: Aims and Lessons So what problem was Creative Commons trying to solve? And from what in the past did we learn? Creative Commons took its idea — give away free copyright licenses…

Creative Commons makes a cameo appearance in a New York Times article about the just announced Open Content Alliance: When it comes to copyrighted materials, the newly formed group appears to be taking a more cautious approach by seeking permission from copyright holders and by making works available though a Creative Commons license, whereby the…

On first glance — brown hair, pale skin, and undergrad-style clothes — Rich Baraniuk looks like an average guy. But look at his eyes, and you know you’re in the presence of something rare. They’re giant and brown and fairly glowing with the light of the millions of synapses firing at the same instant. They’re…

Ourmedia launched three months ago as a home for grassroots media. The site provides a place where anyone can upload video, music, photos, audio clips and other personal media and store it for free on ourmedia’s servers forever. Uploaders have the option of making their works available under a Creative Commons license. Recently, Ourmedia was…

A museum exhibit called “Illegal Art” might sound like a history of naughty pictures. Turns out that the exhibit (through July 25 at SF MOMA Artist’s Gallery) is more innocuous than most primetime TV: A Mickey Mouse gasmask. Pez candy dispensers honoring fallen hip-hop stars. A litigious Little Mermaid. Not kids’ stuff, exactly—but illegal? Copyright…

Scott Andrew LePera founded the lo-fi folk-rock project the Walkingbirds in 1998, around the same time he discovered the Web. Since then he’s actively recorded and released songs in MP3 format directly onto the Web from his little bedroom studio in Northern California. The Walkingbirds’ website sees several hundred downloads each month from all over…

Meet Sal Randolph, the New York-based artist behind Opsound, a new online record label that has adopted the concepts of open source and copyleft and adapted them to music production. Opsound invites musicians to contribute sounds to a “sound pool” licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. Others can then take sounds from the…

Jerry Goldman is determined to archive every recorded oral argument and bench statement in the Supreme Court since 1955, when the Court began to tape-record its public proceedings. Goldman, a professor of political science at Northwestern, founded the OYEZ Project in 1989 “to create and share a complete and authoritative archive of Supreme Court audio.”…