FAIRCOPY has developed an innovative way for musicians to distribute their content over P2P networks and get paid. They’ve also built in a way for fans to leverage the power of P2P to resdistribute their favorite FAIRCOPY artists, and make a commission. Musicians can also offer free samples of their work under Creative Commons licenses.

If you have a website or web-aware application where users create or contribute content, Creative Commons has a service that allows users to choose a license for their works from your site via a popup, redirect, iframe, or web control. One may now specify or allow users to choose an iCommons jurisdiction-specific legal port via…

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…