by Ethan Smith, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal For some people, the future of copyright law is here, and it looks a lot like Gilberto Gil. The Brazilian singer-songwriter plans to release a groundbreaking CD this winter, which will include three of his biggest hits from the 1970s. It isn’t the content of…

Magnatune provides “Internet music without the guilt.” Based in Berkeley, California, Magnatune is a record label with a 21st Century business model, offering consumers a unique mix of free and paid music. One of the first for-profit companies to adopt Creative Commons’ copyright licenses into its strategy, Magnatune has amassed both an impressive buzz and…

Freesound is a repository of CC-licensed samples … around 20,000 samples, recently integrated with ccMixter via the Sample Pool API. We recently spoke to Bram de Jong, Freesound founder and researcher at the Music Technology Group of Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Creative Commons (“CC”): How did Freesound come about? Bram de Jong, Freesound Founder…

iGeneration, a group blog by University of Western Australia academicsstudents (note that every link is footnoted) has added a post examining the Creative Commons weblog (i.e., the one you’re reading now) to their “Critical Evaluation Exercise” series: By evaluating the organisation’s blog through the lens of this mission statement, taking into account the interactive nature…

The Public Library of Science is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. PLoS emerged in October 2000 through the effort of three dynamic and highly respected scientists: Nobel Laureate and former head of the National Institutes of Health Harold Varmus, molecular biologist Pat Brown…

Yesterday Yahoo! announced that their search index had grown to 20 billion documents. That, along with continued adoption of Creative Commons licenses, explains 53 million linkbacks to our licenses according to Yahoo! linkback queries. In May, when Yahoo!’s index apparently consisted of 8 billion documents, we found 16 million pages with license links. So discounting…

Forbes magazine columnist Sam Whitmore writes about “four distinct groups that will create content no matter what transpires on the business end of media”: Then there’s the rise of the mixmaster. … Traditional copyright law didn’t foresee this kind of thing. … A potential solution already exists from San Francisco-based Creative Commons, a non-profit organization…

Today I learned that the word divers has an old usage meaning “diverse” or “various.” Divers hands is an old phrase used to indicate collaborative authorship, now most often used for works building on H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, e.g., ‘by HP Lovecraft and Divers Hands’. Skotos has released another CC-licensed comic: Lovecraft Country: Return to…

wpLicense 0.5 is out. wpLicense is a project I whipped up a while back to experiment with the Creative Commons web services and AJAX. I also needed CC licensing for WordPress and wasn’t satisfied with the existing solutions. This is the third release I’ve made, and the first I actually think should be usable by…

Speaker, blogger, writer, and former radio personality, Doc Searls is the Senior Editor of Linux Journal, co-founder of GeekPAC and the American Open Technology Consortium, and a leading blogger. Widely recognized as an authority on technology and marketing, Doc is co-author of the #1 sales and marketing bestseller The Cluetrain Manifesto, which will be released…