Here’s a good piece from Wired News on the always excellent Future of Music Conference, held this weekend in Washington, DC. (Sadly no one from Creative Commons HQ was able to make it this year, but plenty of our friends did. Check out Siva Vaidhyanathan’s guest spot on our chairman’s blog for his take on…

Prix Ars Electronica, a 25 year-old international arts award, has announced their 2004 prize winners. We are honored to learn that Creative Commons has been awarded one of the top honors, the Golden Nicas, in the “Net Vision” category.

You may have noticed some new names on our blog of late. Roland Honekamp, an Internet entrepreneur in Germany, recently joined Creative Commons as Christiane Asschenfeldt‘s right-hand-man at iCommons HQ in Berlin. Heather Ford, a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow here at Stanford, is helping lead iCommons Africa’s development, with a focus on South Africa, her…

The Swiss movie CH7 was released on the internet under a CC licence at the end of April. The 90min action film – featuring Denise Meili, Yvan Piccino and Noe Muller – is currently being shown exclusively in Switzerland but can be downloaded for free (www.CH7.ch). CH7 is a production of Cineartis, an organisation seeking…

When Creative Commons’ model was forming, members of the founding team often cited an example of one day being able to search for photos of the Eiffel Tower that could be used noncommercially — an arbitrary example to articulate our vision. Our licenses, and metadata schema were built to make this a reality. We can…

The Pew Internet Project released a report today, which surveyed musicians and internet users. While the downloading habits portion of the results were covered in the NY Times today, the most compelling statistic from the artist report was this: 83% [of musicians] have provided free samples of their work online and significant numbers say free…

Creative Commons spent the day at Expo for the Artist, the 5th annual gathering of artists, nonprofits, and community organizations at Cellspace, in San Francisco, USA. Celebrating its fifth year, the catch-all event included free workshops on grantwriting, burlesque, painting, self-publishing, navigating the music industry, metalworking, and more. Watch the Expo website for a series…

Check out some of the entries in the comments. You’ve still got till May 28th to make your remix! Post your entry to the comments on the blog, or send email to us. Here is the original call for entries: Take a crack at remixing, or making a video for Jim’s Big Ego’s song Mix…

I recently ran across Doctor Paradox (a.k.a. Barb). She creates very funky, fun, and creative sample-loop-based music using Ableton Live and other tools for the Mac. I recently spoke with her about CC licensing, found art in remixes, and music in general. Apparently I caught her in the middle of reading Larry Lessig’s The Future…

MIT’s The Tech newspaper recently sat down with Motion Picture Association of America head Jack Valenti for an interview about digital rights. The writer, a MIT engineering student, probes (perhaps a bit too tenaciously) the bad side of the DMCA, namely DVD encryption and playback on Linux, which is currently illegal. In the end it’s…