Cabinet minister by day, mover of souls by night. At total ease bouncing from baritone to falsetto and back again. As nimble on stage as those half his age. Master of a crowd and, in person, friendly as can be. Gold-selling and Creative Commons-adopting. Is Gilberto Gil the world’s coolest man? Minister Gil with assistant…

Wired has a short write-up of the GarageBand (the website for musicians, not the Apple software) annoucement to include a Creative Commons license during song uploads. If you’ve never tried out GarageBand, sign up and give it a whirl. Listeners rate song samples as one vs. another, and you can view the top rated songs…

The NY Times has an interesting story of a new movie project called Wizard People, Dear Reader. It’s a derivative work where the first Harry Potter movie plays while artist Brad Neely creates his own soundtrack to the film. It falls into a gray area of law and Warner Brothers declined to comment on it.…

A few more words about the iCommons Brazil launch. It is hard to do the event justice. It was completely overwhelming, a true celebration, and we’ve only now recovered from the whole thing and regrouped. As you know, iCommons Brazil made its debut at the 5th Annual Software Livre conference in Porto Alegre. An afternoon…

Stay Free Magazine has a great interview with Chuck D and Hank Shocklee from Public Enemy. In it, they discuss how lax copyright laws of the late 1980s allowed them to produce thickly sampled songs for their first two major label releases. “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” and “Fear of…

In about an hour the official launch celebration of Creative Commons Brazil will begin. Neeru and I are here at the 5th Annual Software Livre conference in Porto Alegre with the iCommons Brazil team from Rio’s FGV Law School, as well as William Fisher, faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center. Our chairman, Lawrence…

This week’s featured content is Rick Prelinger‘s new film Panorama Ephemera, produced entirely with short government clips from the 1940s-1970s. For those in the Bay Area, it will be shown at the San Francisco Cinematheque on Sunday, June 13 at 7:30 pm. The clips range from the everyday normal to the absolutely bizarre and together…

Legal ports to Brazilian law of Creative Commons 2.0 licenses are now live. Commoners Glenn Otis Brown and Neeru Paharia are at Software Livre 2004 in Porto Alegre for the launch celebration. Chairman Lawrence Lessig will arrive later this week for the official announcement, which will be led by Brazilian Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil.…

The BBC recently announced they’ll be opening up their archive and applying Creative Commons licenses to the works. A group of interested folks have started a list to talk about the release and produced a petition to support the decision.

Creative Commons is one of this month’s features on the Ibiblio home page. Ibiblio hosts Creative Commons’ movies and mailing lists, among many other resources. “The public’s library and digital archive” lives up to its tagline. Browse their virtual stacks.