The Wikimedia Foundation board has approved the licensing changes voted on by the community of Wikipedia and its sister sites. The accompanying press release includes this quote from Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig: “Richard Stallman’s commitment to the cause of free culture has been an inspiration to us all. Assuring the interoperability of free culture…

And we’d like to not think of ourselves as blockheads, either. If you came across Mark Helprin’s bizarre Op-Ed from a couple of weeks ago, you might have caught the legendary novelist playing the guilt-by-association-game by arguing that we’re “antagonistic to the authorial right.” In fact its the “authorial right” that makes CC work —…

Domas Mituzas writes in an extremely nice post: It takes time to understand one is ‘creative commoner’. I do have a t-shirt with such caption, but it is much more comfortable once you start feeling real power of use and reuse of information. Few anecdotes… He tells stories of the joy of being reused (see…

Creative Commons licensing has been highlighted in a couple prominent discussions of “cloud computing” documents recently. Last week Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz wrote about Sun’s cloud computing strategy: Second, we announced the API’s and file formats for Sun’s Cloud will all be open, delivered under a Creative Commons License. That means developers can freely stitch…

Today (March 24) is Ada Lovelace Day: Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers,…

Over on the Science Commons blog, Thinh writes: The NIH Public Access Policy, which was due to expire this year, has now been made permanent by the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, signed into law last week. Last year, Science Commons, SPARC, and ARL jointly released a White Paper authored by our board member Mike Carroll…

The potential migration of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects to using CC BY-SA as their primary content license has spurred some interesting discussions about attribution — how to give credit for a massively collaborative work in a variety of mediums? This question is relevant regardless of migration, but clearly migration has prompted the discussion and…

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, responding to a proposal for a day of sharingstealing: Gibbs is simply showing his own ignorance of the difference between scarce and infinite goods. That’s because his “Day of Sharing” is a recommendation that people steal (yes, steal!) physical things. He claims that this will show people that sharing music is stealing…

Yesterday, we posted about Facebook’s recent Terms of Service ordeal and how it demonstrates the need for human readable legal deeds. Now, Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is asking the Facebook community for feedback on a Facebook Bill of Rights. We think this is a great opportunity for you, our community, to let Facebook know how…

By now you’ve probably heard that Facebook modified their Terms of Service and after facing a huge community backlash, returned them to their original state. Most of the issues at play were outside the scope of what we work on at CC, but the incident brings up something that we are very much interested in:…