On December 15, 2004 Creative Commons will launch the Fine Art of Sampling Contest. The contest intends to build off of the WIRED CD, where contestants will be challenged to sample the WIRED CD song(s) they love most, into their own creation of musical genius. Look for the announcement here on December 15th!

At the turn of 2004, we laid out our New Year’s Resolutions for Creative Commons. The year’s not quite up, but I’m going offline soon, so I thought it would be a good time to check in on our progress. I’m happy to report that the state of the Commons is strong. (If I personally…

Andreas Bovens suggested looking at this comment on a Slashdot story on the future of digital audio. You may be able to pick up the gist of the comment thread from the punchline: Maybe the problem isn’t that the music is fragile, only that your rights are. Maybe the solution isn’t worrying so much about…

While you’re watching the Internet’s über librarian check out ccPublisher, our desktop app that makes it easy for you to add your CC-licensed audio and video to the über library for free. Keep an eye out for future installments of C-SPAN’s Digital Future. Creative Commons chair Lawrence Lessig will entertain on March 3 next year.…

Yesterday I had the chance to talk to a workshop the Northern California Association of Law Libraries put on here in San Francisco. Organized by Frances Jones, Director of the California Judicial Center Library (we met back at the American Association of Law Libaries conference in Boston not long ago), the workshop included great talks…

WINKsite, a publishing and community platform that helps creators bring their content into the mobile environment, has recently launched the Creative Commons Mobile Library, containing Creative Commons licensed works that can be viewed from mobile devices. The initial group of content contains a selection of books licensed under Creative Commons licenses, and is set to…

Making music mash-ups (combining two songs, layered one over the other) is relatively easy for those in the know when compared with recording your own tracks, but it’s not always easy to pick up an audio application and understand the ins and outs of it. While some have called for tutorials to help music fans…

The FreeCulture.org undead art contest is over and winners have been announced. Taking first prize is the very well done bit of droll humor How to Survive a Zombie Epidemic. All of the entries and source material are in the public domain or CC-licensed, so you’re free to reuse in your own horror spoof, music…

The NY Times and WIRED News both have stories today on a recent survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project about music and the Internet — specifically, musicians’ attitudes about the Internet and its effects on the business. Says the study’s author, Mary Madden: The first large-scale surveys of the internet’s impact on…

NGO Photos is a great new resource site (in Finnish) acting as a large free photograph repository for NGOs. Ramin Miraftabi, the person behind NGO Photos, explains the site here (in English) and why he set it up.