Collagist People Like Us (a.k.a. Vicki Bennett) is most at home exploring fault lines — artistic, emotional, legal. Take “Going Out of My Town,” one of many songs Bennett has made available under a Creative Commons license. It starts with an unsettling assortment of pops and fizzes, then introduces an acoustic guitar sample under a…

Photo © Iñaki Vinaixa Dj Spooky (aka Paul Miller) is a multimedia DJ and Creative Commons advocate who remixes not only music but also film/cinema and fine art. Spooky’s film Rebirth of a Nation intersperses modern images with cuts from D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (now in the public domain) to create a new…

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…

openDemocracy is an online magazine that provides a forum in which global issues relating to politics and culture are debated, many of which do not receive sufficient or sufficiently careful attention by the mainstream media. Its purpose is to “publish clarifying debates which help people make up their own minds.” Since 2001, openDemocracy.net has published…

I got to feeling like I was someone special — not everyone had a chum as exotic as Keep-A-Movin’ Dan, the legendary missionary who visited the only places left that were closed to the Bitchun Society. I can’t say for sure why he hung around with me. He mentioned once or twice that he’d liked…

You may have read this Featured Commoner’s technology columns in the San Jose Mercury Sun News or on Sillicon Valley.com. Dan Gillmor has been writing about technology, business, and policy for as long as such a beat has existed. His new book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, tells the…

I’m always amazed at how far the power of invention mixed with a determination to realize your idea on a large scale can take you. That’s why the new PBS one hour television series about the people who are shaping technology and the Silicon Valley landscape seems so interesting. PBS will be launching NerdTV, the…

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…

ccMixter-meister Victor Stone points to the definitive list for the moment of podcasting safe music resources at Dave’s Imaginary Sound Space. Many CC-licensed music sites are listed, including many I hadn’t seen before. Dave’s list is a great place to start if you’re looking for CC-licensed music for your podcast or otherwise. We have an…