You may have heard about Gatehouse Media suing the New York Times Co. over the linking of Creative Commons licensed news stories on the Times’ Boston.com. Zachary Seward over at the Nieman Journalism Lab has been covering the various developments of the case and most interestingly, an e-mail from Howard Owens (whom we highlighted in…
Wikipedia began 8 years ago today and now exists in 265(!) languages with over 10 million articles among them. In those 8 years Wikipedia has grown from an outlandish dream and into a reality far more outlandish than the original dream — it now seems silly to compare Wikipedia to past encyclopedias, for while Wikipedia…
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…
A great article in the most recent WIRED, Clive Thompson on How T-Shirts Keep Online Content Free, discusses the growing hybrid economy developed by purveyors of free content looking for a stable source of income. Their answer? Schwag in general, t-shirts in particular: Increasingly, creative types are harnessing what I’ve begun to call “the T-shirt…
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,…
Mark Hosler, co-founder of experimental music and sound collage act Negativland, recently took a trip to Washington D.C., where he penned this letter to members of congress on creativity and copyright. From metroactive: Ours is a world in which copyright has fallen woefully behind the curve of what the public actually wants to do with…
Robin Chase, co-founder and former CEO of car sharing service Zipcar, and current CEO of online carpooling service GoLoco recently wrote a great post entitled “Time for Cooperative Capitalism” on her blog, Network Musings. In it, Chase describes the need for developing systems that enable the easy and efficient sharing of resources – both online…
It is one thing for the relatively nascent Wikipedia to embrace free culture as a way to create and share new cultural works, but it is another thing for established media players constrained by traditional markets and economic forces to embrace free culture. Despite this, it is becoming less difficult to convince incumbent mainstream press…
25 years ago Richard Stallman started the GNU (“Gnu’s Not Unix”) project to create a computer operating system like Unix (then ascendant in computer labs like the one Stallman worked in), but with source code free for programmers to run, study, share, and improve. Free software from the GNU project now powers in the range…