SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), along with other sponsors, is organizing the second annual Sparky Awards, “a contest that recognizes the best new short videos on the value of sharing and aims to broaden the discussion of access to scholarly research by inviting students to express their views creatively.” Last year’s winners were…

CC Australia announces: Registration is now officially open for the Creative Commons ‘Building an Australasian Commons’ Conference. The conference will be held on Tuesday 24th June 2008 from 8.30am – 5pm at the State Library of Queensland, South Brisbane, and is proudly supported by Creative Commons Australia, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries…

Huh? Isn’t video on the web ubiquitous already? Sort of. Video on the web today is seriously lacking when it comes to things like addressability (e.g., a standard way to link to a specific time segment or frame region), standard codecs, and metadata. All of these are really important if video (and other media types)…

I hate to beat a dead horse, but the horse’s promoters provide a convenient excuse when they claim the dead horse is making a comeback. The horse in question of course is DRM (emphasis added): “(Recently) I made a list of the 22 ways to sell music, and 20 of them still require DRM,” said…

Jonathan Zittrain has recently released his new book, The Future of the Internet — And How To Stop It. In honor of this important work, CC has teamed up with the EFF and Stanford to hold an event for people to come hear him speak about his book and to meet others interested in and…

The language learning website, italki.com, has been around as a social networking site since 2006. Starting in April, they decided to develop a new version of italki: italki Knowledge. italki Knowledge is made up of a bunch of wikis functioning as open textbooks—free for anyone to access and edit. The wikis span a multitude of…

Magnatune, the online record label that has been pioneering open business practices for years, has now launched a subscription service. Read the announcement for lots of interesting information about the service and the business. In other Magnatune news, there’s now a Magnatune plugin for Songbird, a nice addition to those for Amarok and Rhythmbox. It’s…

Total Recut, an online social network for fans and creators of video remixes we blogged about earlier here, is holding a Video Remix Challenge over the next month in which aspiring filmmakers/remixers are asked to create a 3 minute short to respond to the theme, ‘What is Remix Culture?’. CC Founder Lawrence Lessig is one…

GreenYour.com is a new website that aims to create an easily accessible database of simple ways to make your everyday choices more environmentally friendly. This is accomplished through a listing of broad categories – appliances, personal care, clothing, etc. – with a variety of sub-categories – air-conditioning, face wash, shoes, etc. – that contain professional…

More very exciting news from Nine Inch Nails: Just two months after the Creative Commons-licensed release of NIN’s Ghosts I-IV, the band has released another album, entitled The Slip, also under CC terms. NIN has this to say about The Slip, which, like its predecessor, is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. we…