Hype Machine, Blog Fresh Radio, Musebin, and imeem have teamed up to deliver the Music Blog Zeitgeist 2008, an assessment of the years best albums, artists, and songs as decided by music bloggers. The Zeitgeist didn’t poll bloggers directly but rather looked at the huge amount of data Hype Machine gathered over 2008 in regards…

NIN’s Creative Commons licensed Ghosts I-IV has been making lots of headlines these days. First, there’s the critical acclaim and two Grammy nominations, which testify to the work’s strength as a musical piece. But what has got us really excited is how well the album has done with music fans. Aside from generating over $1.6…

The Craft Economy, a Toronto-based, CC-loving, CD-stapling, copyright reforming group of musicians, recently released their latest EP, Is On Your Side, for wide release under a CC BY-NC-SA license. The disc is available on on iTunes, eMusic, as a torrent file, and as a physical CD for $5.

Digital Foundations: Intro to Media Design with the Adobe Creative Suite is a new book that aims to teach the principles of Bauhaus design and its relation to modern software, Adobe’s Creative Suite in particular: Digital Foundations uses formal exercises of the Bauhaus to teach the Adobe Creative Suite. All students of digital design and…

Monday and Tuesday next week the Program for the Future Conference celebrates the 40th anniversary of Doug Engelbart’s famous Demo, which presaged much of modern computing, in 1968 (related in some ways, see Creative Commons 1967). From the conference website: Engelbart dreamed of technology and tools that increased our Collective Intelligence and a stunning example…

This week, the Grammy Awards nominations were announced – and, for the first time, a Creative Commons-licensed track and album are on the list. Nine Inch Nails’ “34 Ghosts IV” is nominated for Best Rock Instrumental Performance, while the album that track appears on, Ghosts I-IV, is up for Best Boxed Or Special Limited Edition…

Change.gov, the website of US president-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, has undergone some important and exciting changes over the past few days. Among them is the site’s new copyright notice, which expresses that the bulk of Change.gov is published under the most permissive of Creative Commons copyright licenses – CC BY. Except where otherwise noted,…

Creative Commons Board Chair James Boyle’s new book is out — The Public Domain: Enclosing of the Commons of the Mind, published by Yale University Press. Read and comment online or download and share the the PDF under a CC BY-NC-SA license. Buy a hardcopy. The Public Domain cover, evolved from excellent contest entries. We…

Pratham Books is a nonprofit publisher started by the Pratham Education Initiative, which, since 1994, has been working to secure primary education for every child in India. “Pratham Books is a not-for-profit trust that seeks to publish high-quality books for children at a affordable cost in multiple Indian languages. Pratham Books is trying to create…

One of the things we’ve become very interested in finding more examples of are creators who are using our licenses in combination with traditional business models. For example, many musicians (including our recent Commoner Letter author Jonathan Coulton) sell copies of their CC-licensed music. This may seem cognitively dissonant but in practice it makes perfect…