A couple weeks old, but worth reading: Cory Doctorow excoriates Science Fiction Writers of America for issuing takedowns on his behalf, without his permission, against sites hosting his books, with permission (under CC licenses). Meanwhile, Cory blogs about another author’s science fantasy trilogy released under a CC license and is writing a column in Locus…

Intentionally controversial (and funny) pointed out by Techdirt: However, as Bob Lefsetz points out, McCartney’s album looks like it’s a money loser for Starbucks — though McCartney likely made money from Starbucks who probably paid him a nice sum to put the album out on the new label. However, as Lefsetz points out, he could…

Behold is a phenomenal resource that “attempts to catalogue CC images with quality comparable to that of professional image archives such as Getty Images or Corbis, by using the social structure of Flickr and image content analysis”. The ultimate aim of Behold is to offer graphic designers and artists access to high quality images that…

From the Science Commons blog … Now up on MIT World, “Copyright, Fair Use, and the Cultural Commons.” The Web cast is from the April 28, 2007 panel discussion featuring Creative Commons‘ own Hal Abelson, William Uricchio (who moderated the event), Wendy Gordon, Gordon Quinn, and Pat Aufderheide. From the Web site: “Moderator William Uricchio…

At this weekend’s Singularity Summit in San Francisco, “openness” of all sorts — open source, open access, open content, transparency — seems to be considered an uncontroversial and important part of making “AI and the future of humanity” a good one, for example: If the singularity is in fact near, the fundamental tools of information,…

I will be speaking on “Emerging Fields of Application for RMI: Search Engines and Users” at the upcoming WIPO Information Seminar on Rights Management Information: Accessing Creativity in a Network Environment September 17 in Geneva. The seminar is free and open to the public with pre-registration. Andres Guadamuz, co-director of the AHRC Research Centre for…

OwnTerms is an online repository for CC-licensed legal documents, allowing business startups easy and open access to various contracts without the cost of having a specific one tailored in their name. From OwnTerms: OwnTerms is designed as a repository for “boilerplate” legal documents: those that every web site, startup, or entrepreneur needs but doesn’t want…

From the Science Commons blog … James Boyle‘s latest column in The Financial Times – “The irony of a web without science” – examines how the lessons learned from the world wide web can and should be applied to the sciences. From research funding to commercial publishing, Boyle posits that the capabilities made available through…

Sony Europe is releasing marketing assets for its Blu-ray Disc format under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license as an integral part of its campaign: “By creating assets available exclusively online and licensing them under Creative Commons, we are encouraging increased interaction between Sony and our target audience,” says James Kennedy, General Manager for Communications Europe…

The Internet Archive has been the most important repository of Creative Commons licensed media since Creative Commons launched over 4 1/2 years ago. However, their ftp-based upload was a barrier to those unfamiliar with that pre-web technology and the Internet Archive’s upload workflow. A small price to pay for otherwise free access to the repository…