Creative Commons chairman Lawrence Lessig has just released his new book, Free Culture today, both online as a licensed downloadable PDF and in stores. The book covers the current state of copyright law and what it means to our culture and society. Give it a look, and if you like what you see, ordering online…

As far as I’m concerned, the very best among the many great things about being part of Creative Commons is getting to meet CC users and supporters face-to-face. Knowing that one and a half million web pages (and growing) carry Creative Commons licenses is always an inspiring thought, but getting together with musicians and writers…

Bricks in the Wall Theater and drama fans are familiar with the Fourth Wall, the conceptual boundary between performer and audience. It’s an artistic term, but we’ve now extended the concept in a Creative Commons way. At the South by Southwest Film Festival this week, I moderated a panel, “Can Copyright Bring Filmmaker and Audience…

From the South by Southwest Music Festival, Creative Commons brings you the new Music Sharing License and Get Content search engine. This copyright license lets your fans know they can download, copy, and share your music online, but not sell, remix, or make any other commercial use out of it. (The license is based on…

Machinista, an arts festival focusing on machine-related art, will use Creative Commons licenses for the DVD containing the winning entries. The winners will be chosen out of the 280 submissions, which are themed as “the world as seen by the machines.” Since the content will be CC-licensed, we’re also hoping to have it hosted at…

If you’re at South by Southwest in Austin, come by our panels at 10am (music and copyright) and 11:30am (film and copyright) Monday morning. Special guests include two Austinites: tech-media renaissance man Wiley Wiggins and GET CREATIVE! contest winner Justin Cone, whose 2-minute short “Building on the Past” perfectly exemplifies the CC mission. (How many…

I found PIA’s Symbols through the Creative Commons search engine — a great album of electronic music. You can find lots of music through the search engine, which has currently indexed only 50,000 URLs out of the 1,400,000 URLs we know to contain CC licensed content (there are another 400,000 URLs in the queue). Symbols…

This week’s featured content is the ebook Just In Tokyo. It’s a offbeat guidebook to Tokyo written by web veteran Justin Hall and is now available for download under a Creative Commons license. First printed a few years go, it’s now out of print and Justin is asking for voluntary donations if you like the…

We’re happy to announce the winners in our GET CREATIVE!: Moving Images Contest. Last fall, we asked aspiring filmmakers and flash artists to create a short film that explained the mission of the Creative Commons. Our panel of judges has selected the top three entries and they’re all terrific. We want to thank everyone that…

Just a little over two weeks until South by Southwest, the wonderful tech-film-music conference in Austin, Texas, USA (my beloved hometown). If you’re in town, come check out our two panels on music (Sample, Share, or Both?) and film (Can Copyright Bring the Audience to the Director?) the morning of March 15. That night we’ll…