In theory, publishing publicly funded television content under open licenses should be a no-brainer. As with publicly funded research, open licenses improve distribution, allow for remix creativity, and unlock access to popular free knowledge platforms such as Wikipedia. In practice, however, advocates of open licenses in the realm of public-service media face several hurdles, such…

Wikimedia Office in Berlin / Hari Prasad Nadig / CC BY-SA On March 2nd, the Creative Commons & P2PU School of Open will join forces with Wikimedia at the Wikimedia Germany offices in Berlin! As part of Open Education Week, CC Germany and Wikimedia Germany are kicking things off early with a workshop to introduce…

The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (BY-SA) has been enforced by a judicial injunction in Germany. Legal analysis will be added to our case law database in the coming days. Till Jaeger reported the case (in German; English machine translation) at ifrOSS (Institut für Rechtsfragen der Freien und Open Source Software), where one may…

Today a new German site launched, IGEL (“Initiative gegen ein Leistungsschutzrecht”; in English, “initiative against a related right”). The site, spearheaded by German lawyer Till Kreutzer, provides information on a possible proposal for a new “related right” for press publishers. Original content on the site is released under the Creative Commons Attribution license. Additionally, Creative…

Last week we tweeted that Cologne-based libraries had released 5.4 million bibliographic records under CC0. This is tremendous news, as “libraries have been involved with the Open Access movement for a long time.” From the press release, Rolf Thiele, deputy director of the USB Cologne, states: “Libraries appreciate the Open Access movement because they themselves…

Encouraged by the resonance of openeverything camp in December 2008, we’re helping put on a regular series of events about “openness.” This Thursday, Feb. 26, kicks off the first openeverything focus, in tandem with the CC Salon in Berlin. This month we’re focusing on Open Knowledge, delving into project like OKFN‘s Open Knowledge Definition and…

Creative Commons’ CEO, Joi Ito recently gave a talk at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich. If you’ve been waiting to watch a talk introducing Creative Commons to 2009, this is your talk. Joi first hits on how CC helps innovators (especially those online) lower the transaction costs when dealing with cultural works restricted…

Kraftwerk by greenplastic875 | CC BY German electronic-music pioneers Kraftwerk were told yesterday by a judge in Germany that a two-second sample used by a producer in Germany did not infringe on their copyright. From the BBC (emphasis added): The ruling overturns an earlier decision against Moses Pelham’s use of a short sample from Metal…