Our friends over at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, who are porting the licenses to Finland, have also translated our comic strips explaining the licenses. Very nice. Under the comics’ license, anyone can make a translation as long as they Share Alike, give us credit, and don’t resell. What language is next?

The porting of the Creative Commons licenses to Japan recently got underway. Leading the effort is the top-notch Japanese IT research institute Glocom. Join or follow the discussion. Read more about iCommons and watch for more countries soon.

Paul Ford, the author, designer, and programmer of the wonderful Ftrain website recently discovered his site’s logo image was also being featured on a new singer-songwriter’s CD. His response for readers is an amusing lesson in the wonders of the public domain.

We’re honored to announce that Joi Ito, venture capitalist, blogger, and tech Renaissance man, has joined our Board of Directors. Ito is the founder and CEO of Neoteny, a venture capital firm, and has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage, and Infoseek Japan. In 1997 Time ranked him as a member of…

This week we’re pointing out the hundreds of photographs taken by freelance writer David Gallagher. His site, lightningfield.com, has been up for the past two and a half years and features photographs and insights from his daily life. There are many shots from New York and photos from various trips worth enjoying and sharing.

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos recently gave NPR listeners a recommendation for summer reading: the Creative Commons-licensed novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow. (Bezos also gave a nod to The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro.) Buy the book, or download it for free — thanks to Cory’s vision and…

Aimee Deep, otherwise known as Aimster, has created a special incentive for people to sign the Reclaim the Public Domain Petition.

We’ve have been enjoying the content on VentureBlog and Bag and Baggage for some time, but recently both of these Creative Commons licensed blogs did a great job covering The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital Conference. Thanks to some restrictions on the conference, professional journalists were not allowed to cover the event, but…

Finland is the first country to take part in iCommons, our project to port the lawyer-readable versions of our licenses for use across the world. The Helsinki Institute for Information Technology has produced a first draft of the Finnish licenses and will lead the process from a public discussion list hosted on our site. The…

The highlight reel from the first week of the Sampling License discussion: Sarah Brown raised concerns that the draft language wasn’t clear enough about the copyrightability of sample-derived works and what other rights the sampler enjoys in them. She suggested we address these issues more explicitly. Cathy Kirkman, however, explained why the license itself need…