River Rat Records, an independent record company based in North London, has adopted CC-licenses for all their releases based on the assumption that sharing of music should be allowed without fear of legal ramifications (as long as it stays non-commercial): Music has never been a purely personal experience (more often it’s a shared one), but…
If interested, check out this great video of a talk CC CEO Lawrence Lessig gave back in March 2007 at The Annual TED Conference entitled “How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law”. There are some sections that are bound to be familiar to those in the CC-community while there are others that are entirely…
The Hardyman, a short story (6,500 words) by Susannah Breslin, published under the CC Attribution license. Story inspired by Hardiman, the first attempt to build a powered exoskeleton in 1965, licensing inspired by Cory Doctorow’s recent HOWTO use CC licenses. Breslin writes: It’s the longest story I ever wrote. I thought about further restricting its…
On the 22nd November Bloodspell, the first feature length machinima production, will be screened in conjunction with a panel on machinima at the London Metropolitan University Graduate Centre. The evening will start with Hugh Hancock, of Strange Company, introducing the concept of machinima and the film, to be followed by a viewing of Bloodspell. After…
This week’s Commoner Letter comes from Beth Kanter, an activist and strong CC supporter. Beth has shown her support in a variety of ways, all which help to spread the word about CC and how it has impacted her own work. ——————————— I am a trainer, coach, and blogger who works with nonprofits on how…
Fedora 8 has implemented a great feature within the Firefox browser that makes it even easier for users to find Creative Commons-licensed materials that they can share, remix and reuse. The pull-down menu right below the main search field is a quick way to filter search results to return CC-licensed open content. Congratulations to Fedora…
CC evangelist Cory Doctorow has a new column up on Locus Online discussing “the fundamentals of using CC licenses for people who are interested in the idea but haven’t tried it yet”. The article outlines the different conditions available in any given CC-license, how the licenses are read (machine/human/lawyer), and takes note of the harmony…
Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona will be hosting Spain’s first national netlabel meeting from November 9-10th. Netlabels, the sleek and thriving record labels of the internet, focus on online distribution and promotion for music released primarily under Creative Commons licenses. London and Berlin have already organized great festivals dedicated to CC music and netlabels,…
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been a tremendous supporter of Creative Commons and our new educational division, ccLearn. The foundation’s newsletter just published a great interview with Catherine Casserly, their Program Officer for Open Educational Resources. Here are a couple excerpts: Aren’t copyright laws an obstacle to all of this? Traditionally, they have…
From the Science Commons blog: “A question that we often see in connection with the use of Creative Commons licenses in OA publishing is how the Creative Commons licenses, (and in particular CC-BY) affect moral rights. One example is this post on the topic by Peter Suber. From the perspective of moral rights, the Creative…