Participatory creativity is hot, hot. The Lollapoola Mash-Up Contest. Our Own GET CREATIVE! Moving Images Contest (winners to be announced next month). MoveOn.org’s Bush in 30 Seconds advertisement contest. And now even the New Yorker has announced the winner of its own analog-version of an open-source creativity contest, which was more interactive than contests past.…

Among the many cool features of our re-design this fall, we may not have given one page the attention it deserved. If you’re marking your work or web page with our little Some Rights Reserved button, you should take a look at our suggestions for making a precise statement about what’s being licensed, complete with…

NPR’s Science Friday last week spoke with Howard Chang, of Stanford Medical School’s Biochemistry Department. Chang discussed his recent article, co-authored with several colleagues and published in the Public Library of Science Biology open-access journal, which explores how scientists can learn about cancer from studying the way common wounds heal. Like all PLoS publications, Chang…

The International Commons project expanded this week to include the launch of UK license discussions. Those interested in participating can check out the draft license and mailing list for details.

New Year’s Resolutions: Make worry-free sampling and re-creativity mainstream. Make 25 country-specific sets of iCommons licenses available. Explore Science Commons. Version licenses. Begin Save-a-Book campaign, revive out-of-print books. Debut metadata search engine prototype. Unveil CC-Mixter — Friendster for musicians. Launch “Anatomy of a Film” project. Build licenses into at least two applications per medium: photography,…

The GET CREATIVE! Moving Image Contest has gone the way of 2003. Many thanks to those of you who submitted entries by the New Year. Our panel of expert judges is now sorting out the winners. Stay tuned!

GET CREATIVE! Enter the Creative Commons Moving Image Contest. Make a 2-minute moving image that describes Creative Commons’ mission. Win a computer, a digital video camera, or an iPod. An amazing panel of judges will select winners. Please read the official rules. Deadline for entries is December 31st, 2003

At our first anniversary party Sunday night, we unveiled a new movie called Reticulum Rex. For those of you that missed the event, the movie can now be seen here, and it acts as a continuation of the story started in our first short, Get Creative. A big thanks to everyone that attended the party,…

LegalTorrents is a new site offering 5Gb of electronic music from a variety of labels, all licensed under Creative Commons. What makes this site unique is the large downloads are shared among everyone downloading, thanks to the P2P technology of BitTorrent. Once you download a client and load up a music torrent file, you’ll be…

In case you missed it among our other many cool re-design features this fall, I’d strongly recommended subscribing to the RSS feeds for Common Content (RSS here) and the Internet Archive (RSS here). Put them in your favorite blog-/news-reader, and you’ve got a fresh batch of free culture waiting for you every morning.