Firas has created a Creative Commons plugin for WordPress, perhaps the most popular open source blog software. Now you can add a CC license to your WordPress blog with just a few clicks.

Tomislav Medak writes in: To promote free/open content production and to mark the official launch of Croatian Creative Commons licenses (Jan 14, 19.00 CET), the Multimedia Institute is organizing a free culture festival that will include: 1) an exhibition presenting public domain resources and featuring free content producing audio and video artists, 2) a number…

The New York Times continues to write about mash-ups as if they just discovered them. Today a sidebar outlining the history of sampling and mash-ups appears in the Week in Review. Conspicuously missing: The WIRED CD and the current “Fine Art of Sampling” contest. (Negativland gets a mention, though.)

In a long article on piracy and the Chinese economy, the New York Times Magazine’s Ted C. Fishman describes Toyota’s judo-like approach to piracy: don’t fight overwhelming forces head-on; use their momentum to your advantage . . . Another approach to the Chinese intellectual-property regime is to leverage its vitality. The Japanese may be showing…

Katie Dean of Wired News has a story about the general response to Bill Gates’s casual lobbing of the word “communist” in the general direction of anyone who thinks critically about how the law regulates information. The story quotes part of my response to Gates; I thought I’d print the rest of it here. (Dean…

While we’ve been testing out CC Publisher betas over the past few weeks, we’ve recently gone 1.0 on the application and figured it was a good time to create an easy to follow tutorial for using CC Publisher. We’ve also created one for CC Lookup, our audio file verification app. In addition to both new…

In the last New Yorker issue of 2004 (I’m doing some catch-up reading), Ben McGrath has a fun Talk of the Town piece on Caleb Smith, a guy who walked every street on the island of Manhattan over the last year and a half. The end of the piece mentions Mike Epstein, of the excellent…

Read Hugh MacLeod’s How to Be Creative now. Nearly any sentence could be lifted as a pull quote, so I won’t bother lifting any. Only fifty pages, super easy to read ebook formatting, great cartoons, tremendous relevance to creating free culture while surviving and thriving, and it’s CC licensed. Also check out the few dozen…

Staccato is a music program featuring all Creative Commons licensed tracks selected by Matt May. If you dig the sort of super eclectic show often found on the best community and college radio stations where the dj cares about nothing but the music and knows the music, sometimes producing transcendent experiences … you’ll be comfortable…

Update: Missed the party? The important public parts are recorded on video. Download with BitTorrent.