(Next in a continuing series of posts about core Commoners I’m happy to have worked with. Apologies for the intermittent, serial nature of these entries; it’s taken longer than I thought.) I’ve known our corporate counsel Diane Cabell for about seven years, since first meeting her back in the early days of the Berkman Center.…

Today, Creative Commons wishes FreeCulture.org a happy 1st birthday! We are truly grateful that there is an organized, passionate group of students advocating for free culture around the world. It is true that we indeed do have a very special present for you. However, we need to wait for the license. Stay tuned…

After years of toil the free music encyclopedia MusicBrainz is now backed by a nonprofit foundation with a fantastic best-of-the-usual-suspects board. MusicBrainz has taken an innovative approach to open data: core factual information (artist, album, track) is appropriately dedicated to the public domain, while community generated information is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. Also check out MetaBrainz’s…

In preparation for the International Computer Music Conference to be held in Barcelona in September 2005, the Music Technology Group and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, have created the freesoundproject. The freesound project is a collaborative database of sounds – not songs or compositions – but sounds: audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps. All sounds uploaded to…

I spent the past weekend at Notacon in Cleveland, OH. While there was one talk devoted to a brief history of copyright in the US, the most exciting talk, for me, was completely unexpected. Jerry Rockwell presented a talk called “Evolution of a Tune: My process of arranging and composing in a Home Studio.” I…

We were quite happy to hear that today the Webby Award nominations came out, and Creative Commons is up for “Best Home/Welcome Page.” We couldn’t have done it without the crew at Adaptive Path leading the user research, prototyping, and testing, while Doug Bowman helped with the illustrations, and Ryan Junell with the logos. I…

Ryan Junell and I first met at the University of Texas, where we both took a class about the Internet (Ryan designed UT’s first web site; I caught on more slowly) and saw each other at a lot of rock shows. It wasn’t until Creative Commons started up and needed a graphic designer that Ryan…

One of the many great decisions Christiane has made during her tenure at iCommons was to bring Roland Honekamp on to lend a helping hand in Berlin. Roland, a former Net entrepreneur, quickly made himself an indispensable utility player, attending iCommons launches on short notice, helping out with press relations and myriad internal iCommons matters,…

When Christiane Asschenfeldt joined Creative Commons, in April 2003, Creative Commons offered one set of copyright licenses: in American English, based in good part on U.S. law. Two years later, CC offers fifteen different localized licenses, in thirtheen languages, from countries on four continents. (A couple dozen other localized licenses are in some state of…

Earlier this week at the Flash Forward conference (centered around Macromedia’s Flash product), Creative Commons Chariman and CEO Lawrence Lessig gave a talk about bringing a culture of sharing to the Flash community like the one that exists for HTML. Every web browser can view source of any HTML document, and millions of online publishers…