Watch Lessig at M3 without Powerpoint

Neeru Paharia, March 30th, 2005

The folks at Billboard have put up a video stream of Professor Lessig’s keynote address given last week at M3.

Featured Commoner: Fading Ways Music

Neeru Paharia, March 30th, 2005

I recently had a chance to catch up with longtime supporter of Creative Commons, Neil Leyton from Fading Ways Music. Fading Ways has been a true leader adopting Creative Commons in the commercial music space, and has even taken to educating others — Neil is organizing this upcoming music symposium in the UK.

Check out the Featured Commoner interview with Neil, as I’m confident you’ll find him to be very insightful.

5 cent download store comes to life!

Neeru Paharia, March 30th, 2005

A week ago, I blogged about the 5 cent download. Soon after, I heard from Tryad, a virtual band that spans the ocean from Japan to Ohio. They decided to open their own 5 cent download store, and also offer the service to other artists for free (as long as the bandwidth costs remain manageable).

So, if you want to sell you Creative Commons licensed music, drop them a line. If you want to support artists who go CC, go buy some music. Let’s build some good content, and hopefully, a good market.

Thanks Tryad for taking this idea and running with it.

Well That’s Embarassing

Nathan Yergler, March 30th, 2005

So in my haste to get ccPublisher 1.1 out on Monday, I neglected to include some of the supporting files in the distribution. This didn’t cause immediate problems on Windows, but did prevent the application from launching on Mac OS X. So without further delay, ccPublisher 1.1.1. Windows and Mac OS X download available.

Ghostwriting: Attribution and Accountability

Glenn Otis Brown, March 29th, 2005

I’m a week behind on extracurricular reading, so forgive the delay in drawing attention to this often-hilarious essay on ghostwriting by Joe Queenan in last week’s NYTimes book review.

The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a couple of nuggets for the IP-minded:

[I]n recent times a cloud has begun to hang over the deliciously vaporous world of ghostwriting. This is because greater transparency about the collaborative process has inadvertently led to greater confusion. Things started to take a bad turn when the basketball legend Charles Barkley complained that he had been misquoted in his own autobiography. This gave rise to a niggling suspicion in some quarters that ghostwriters were churning out books with only minimal input from their nominal authors. Shocking! . . .

And on Newt Gingrich’s shameless (and stylistically criminal) ghostwriting:

I do not think I am being overcritical by saying that such prose lacks the epic grandeur of a Tolstoy or a Norman Mailer. But what is particularly irksome for the reviewer is that he has no way of knowing who is to blame for these hideous passages. Newt Gingrich is still a powerful voice in the American political community and still young enough to run again for high public office. If William R. Forstchen is the one responsible for the lunkheaded plot and comic-book dialogue of this infantile novel or the more recent ”Gettysburg” (”He thought of Elizabeth, sweet Elizabeth, wondering what she would say of him if he ever confessed his terror”), that is one thing. But if Gingrich himself is the one firing off these fusillades of malarkey, it could be a portent of some very unnerving stump speeches in years to come.

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ccPublisher 1.1 Released

Nathan Yergler, March 28th, 2005

After many, many delays, I’m proud to announce the release of ccPublisher 1.1. This is primarily a bug fix release that corrects the most common problems we’ve had reported. This release also accounts for changes in the upload requirements at the Internet Archive.

You can find packages for Windows and Mac OS X here. Go on, give it a try. And if you have suggestions or feedback, email me at nathan@creativecommons.org or file a bug.

Using Creative Commons in the Real World

Matt Haughey, March 24th, 2005

Magnatune founder John Buckman has posted an interview he did with Five Eight Magazine, about the use of Creative Commons licenses in Magnatunes song catalog. He covers the whys and hows of licensing, and how it helped at Magnatune.

Lessig at M3 in Miami

Glenn Otis Brown, March 24th, 2005

Our chairman Lawrence Lessig will be speaking on Creative Commons tomorrow morning (Friday) at the M3 Conference in Miami, at the Raleigh Hotel in South Beach. One of the greatest minds of a generation on Collins Avenue — someone please take video.

Yahoo! Search for Creative Commons

Mike Linksvayer, March 23rd, 2005

Six months ago we noted that one could use Yahoo! link: searches to find Creative Commons licensed content out of 4.7 million indexed pages that linked to a Creative Commons license at that time.

Last month we mentioned that the Yahoo! search index contained over 10 million pages that link to a Creative Commons license.

Now we’re very happy that Yahoo! has built a Creative Commons search interface. As with our own search engine, you can limit results to works you can use commercially or that you can build upon or both.

We’ve added a box to our search engine’s results page that allows you to easily try a similar search at Yahoo! — try out this search for ‘shark’.

For developers, Yahoo! has added a license parameter to their Web Search API.

Read more on the Yahoo! Search blog, where the announcement of Yahoo! Search for Creative Commons features an inspiring guest post from Creative Commons chairperson Lawrence Lessig.

Way to go Yahoo!

(Now close to 14 million pages linking to a CC license.)

More on Amsterdam Meeting

Glenn Otis Brown, March 23rd, 2005

I just noticed this cool photo on the CC Netherlands blog. Not cool ’cause I’m in it — I’ve seen myself before — but rather ’cause of the room of European Commoners shown in it. Was a great event. More photos to share soon, I hope.