Today marks the second anniversary of the first release of Creative Commons licenses. What an amazing two years it has been — we can only hope the coming years will be as extraordinary.

Today we launched a new site, and a new contest. Check out CC Mixter to win a chance to be on the next Fine Arts Militia album featuring Chuck D, or a chance to be featured on the Creative Commons release, THE WIRED CD: Ripped. Sampled. Mashed. Shared. Sample The Beastie Boys, David Byrne, DJ…

Torrentocracy has announced a free BitTorrent hosting service for Creative Commons licensed content: Prodigem. Download one of the beta torrents currently available. Send an email to Torrentocracy creator Gary Lerhaupt to request an upload account. Update: Download all of the Duke Law School Arts Project Moving Image Contest finalists via one torrent at prodigem.

Crooked Timber has a post today on copyright and attribution that cites Creative Commons: In short, the informal economy of academic attribution is much more like the kind of alternative economy that, say, Creative Commons is trying to create than it is like the copyright industry. Academics are usually happy when others rip, remix or…

George Hotelling has a good idea for those network news shows covering the big Google/University public domain scanning story: there is a great video clip of the Internet Archive’s sophisticated scanning equipment available for public domain use right here, and anyone can use it.

Lucas Gonze has a way with words: Can I just say this? Napster politics are brutally boring. The action right now is in making the music and video owned by the major labels and film studios archaic and unpopular. We’re going to do to those properties what talkies did to silent films, what political bloggers…

In October 2003, our website redesign included a new page called Technology Challenges, where we invited volunteer developers to tackle some tough coding projects that could help the cause. Within a couple of weeks, some dude named Nathan Yergler had picked a couple of formidable challenges off like sitting ducks. First was CCMoz, the Firefox…

Like everything we celebrate, Creative Commons is about team creativity and team sweat. As promised (relatively) recently, I want to pause this end-of-the-year holiday season to say thanks to some of the people who have made Creative Commons possible. The people I have in mind here are the ones whom I work with every day.…

“The Mainstream Mash-Up” makes it onto the New York Times’ list of great ideas of 2004. Question #1: Where is Creative Commons here? Don’t they read WIRED at the NYTimes? Question #2: How “mainstream” is a concocted mash-up between Linkin Park + Jay-Z? Hats off to them for innovating, but this is just the tip…

According to one journalist, fashion has borrowed from music, with interesting legal results. An upcoming conference at USC asks if music can borrow back from fashion in a similar way.