Proving that culture can be remixed in almost real-time, a group from San Francisco has created an album of piano and opera versions of US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s statements to the press. They offer sound samples and the lyrics pulled from press briefings on their site, and are currently on tour. Rumsfeld himself has…

A hearty congratulations goes out to The Fray for winning a webby this year. The Fray is an online storytelling site where contributors share tales and allow for comment by readers afterwards. There are also live events held several times a year where folks gather to tell stories on stage, all the audio of which…

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak at the Open Source and Free Software conference, held by the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto. The conference was designed to explore the legal, moral, political, social, commercial, and technical perspectives of open source and free software, to build a broader understanding of the…

Ben Adida will represent Creative Commons at the World Wide Web Consortium Advisory Committee meeting next week, held concurrently with WWW2004 in New York City. This year has seen a number of new proposals on W3C lists for RDF-in-XHTML. Ben has been encouraging the development of a solution that will meet Creative Commons’ requirements. We…

MTV Europe is currently doing a mash-up show called MTV Mash. Mash-up culture has been mainstream in Europe for the past few years, and I hope the show is limited to Europe only because of that, and not because it would be difficult to obtain rights to mash in the States. Links to the songs…

If you’re looking for slice-of-life New York City photographs of the compelling and off-beat, the images at Bluejake and Satan’s Laundromat have got you covered. They’re both licensed under Creative Commons and allow for derivative works, making for some great collage fodder.

The Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal, a very impressive student-run academic publication here, has published its third volume under a Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial-sharealike license. I got to speak at SURJ’s annual awards event this week on Stanford’s campus, and the group’s enthusiasm for open-access research was inspiring.

The Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University has started applying Creative Commons licenses to its journals. Classics@ is available online at their site. It’s great to see further uptake in the educational world, as the ideals of academic publishing are pretty close to the goals of Creative Commons.

Apple just announced they sold 3.3 million songs in 7 days on the iTunes Music Store. To put this in perspective, the entire top ten of the Billboard music chart is tracking just over 2 million units. If anyone in the music industry doubted that people would ever want to pay for music online, Apple’s…

Scott Matthews, of turnstyle web mp3 player fame, has launched a new project called DRUMS. It’s slighty inspired by Creative Commons and the goal is to create a P2P network that is fair to both copyright owners and folks seeking content. If you have something to add to his proposal, pop on over and drop…