CNN is currently carrying an interesting interview with musician Peter Gabriel. Gabriel always seems to be at the bleeding edge of technology, and he describes two of his net music ventures, On Demand Distribution, a backend company that works on music payment and fulfillment systems, and his pet project with Brian Eno, The Magnificent Union…

A-list blogger and CC board member Joi Ito has posted a thoughtful mini essay on why he uses a license that allows commercial use for his blog. He also writes about the decision of whether or not to use a license with the ShareAlike provision. Of course you can always make your own choice 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…

The New York Times published an article about how the music industry influences song choice on American Idol today. I’ve long suspected that contestant song choice was limited to what the show could afford to pay in licensing costs ahead of time, since the choices of songs to cover seem limited. A producer of the…

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…

DMusic, the oldest independent digital online music community now supports Creative Commons in their upload process. More importantly though, DMusic is providing the first web-based application to embed Creative Commons license information into ID3 tags of MP3 files. Now, when you upload your MP3 file to DMusic and choose a Creative Commons license, DMusic will…

This week’s featured content are two new blogs, /run and Nothing Severed Yet. /run is one man’s obsession with all sorts of geek gadgets related to running. While you’d think running is just shoes and shorts, there’s a whole industry of other essential stuff like iPods, pedometers, and high-tech watches that do everything from time…

Cellphone ringtones were a $3 billion business last year, but a new bit of software from Xingtone finally makes it possible to easily create your own sounds. I always thought much of the Opsound archive would make good ringtones. It’ll be interesting to see if more CC music makes its way onto phones everywhere. In…

Here’s a good piece from Wired News on the always excellent Future of Music Conference, held this weekend in Washington, DC. (Sadly no one from Creative Commons HQ was able to make it this year, but plenty of our friends did. Check out Siva Vaidhyanathan’s guest spot on our chairman’s blog for his take on…

Creative Commons spent the day at Expo for the Artist, the 5th annual gathering of artists, nonprofits, and community organizations at Cellspace, in San Francisco, USA. Celebrating its fifth year, the catch-all event included free workshops on grantwriting, burlesque, painting, self-publishing, navigating the music industry, metalworking, and more. Watch the Expo website for a series…