The Wizards of os conference in Berlin proved a veritable feast for Creative Commoners around the world gathering to discuss the future of the digital commons last week. Creative Commons Germany was launched on Friday with an emotional tribute by filmmaker, Michael Grob, who released his full-length feature film, CH7 under a CC license. Along…

If you have a website or web-aware application where users create or contribute content, Creative Commons has a service that allows users to choose a license for their works from your site via a popup, redirect, iframe, or web control. One may now specify or allow users to choose an iCommons jurisdiction-specific legal port via…

The International Herald Tribune has a nice story on the explosive growth of iCommons, with a focus on the recent launch in Germany. The Register UK also has a nice piece. Hats off to Christiane Asschenfeldt, Roland Honekamp, and the many iCommons project leads for the recent boom. More to come.

The New York Times has a great story about the painful process a college professor went through to clear the rights for a short, informative video to be given to incoming students: “It’s crazy,” Professor Turow said of the labyrinth of permissions, waivers and fees he navigated to get the roughly three minutes of video…

Downhill Battle and p2pnet have announced a new video contest. The goal is to encourage people to make short movies and animations about the music industry, filesharing, and the potential we have to change the system. The right video can be the best way to explain these issues and get someone involved, and as always…

Several months ago, Apple released the music software Garageband, allowing anyone with a mac to make some music. Soon after the release, community websites sprang up to allow Garageband users to share music with each other, and build songs together. This is a perfect use for Creative Commons licenses, and earlier we noted that the…

The writings of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg may be amongst the most important in the 20th Century but it’s the sound of Burroughs’ growl and the haunting lilt in Ginsberg’s recitals that have compelled turntablists to use samples of their speaking voices. Sampling pioneers and Ninjatune entrepreneurs Jonathan More and Matt Black (a.k.a.…

We’ve recently flipped the switch on German Creative Commons licenses. Like the recent Brazil, Finland, and Japan licenses, in addition to the rewritten legal code that is now based on German law, the license interface is now available in German, as well as the licenses themselves. Thanks goes out to the folks at both The…

Following many requests on cc-licenses for a list with a more general charter, we’ve created cc-community. If you have a burning question or discussion point related to Creative Commons that doesn’t seem to fit the specific description of any of our many discussion lists, hold back no longer. Subscribe to cc-community. Read the cc-community archives.…

One of the kings of scientific publishing, the journal Nature, has recently launched a forum to bring together articles and information about open access publishing. They’ve even got an RSS feed for updates to the forum. It’s great to see a top journal open a dialogue about a somewhat controversial issue in the scientific publishing…