By ZMcCune (WMF) [CC BY-SA 4.0 ], from Wikimedia Commons

Melody Kramer is a news and public media expert with a special gift for uplifting open knowledge and demonstrating the power of the Commons.

We need your help! Over the next year, we will be investigating and reporting on 2-3 of the most compelling stories about collaboration in the commons. We want to tell the story of when and why a creator first decides to use CC, the kinds of connections they make online, how they invite and encourage…

Open as in Books? / Alan Levine / CC BY-SA This week, U.S. News and World Report ran an excellent story about the rise of openly-licensed educational materials. Simon Owens’ article touches on many of the open education landmarks we’ve been celebrating over the past year, including the Department of Labor’s TAA-CCCT grant program and…

Dan Gillmor is a journalist and established author, having previously published We the Media back in 2004 under a CC BY-NC-SA license. His subject is the changing landscape of media, and the focus of his first book was on distributed, grassroots journalism and its effect on the Big Media monopoly of news. Six years later,…

Last week, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) sent a fundraising letter to its members calling on them to fight “opponents” such as Creative Commons, falsely claiming that we work to undermine copyright.* Creative Commons licenses are copyright licenses – plain and simple. Period. CC licenses are legal tools that creators can…

A couple years ago, the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT Media Lab developed a Web 2.0 programming platform for kids called Scratch. Scratch allows kids, and virtually anyone else, to create and remix rich media of all kinds—video, video games, even simple photo animations. The programming behind Scratch focuses on building blocks, like Legos, to…

Photo by-sa Freddy B. Used with permission from Photographer. I’m in Sapporo for the CC Legal Day, Commons Research Mini-conference which the Metrics Project is but part, and to further promote the CC Case Studies project. As Greg outlined so clearly last week and I presented at the launch of CC Singapore a few days…

Super cool video conversation site Seesmic just rolled out its most requested feature today, Creative Commons licensing of course! Seesmic added all 6 primary licenses as option and CC Attribution 3.0 as default license for videos uploaded. “This means you determine how other people can use your content. Your choices are now between six combinations…