creative commons license

With all the negative talk about BitTorrent, fueled by the billion dollar entertainment industries, it’s refreshing to see that many of the people who actually create the music are using it to further their careers.

Tens of thousands of musicians, from those just starting out to those already established, use BitTorrent to give away their music for free.

What is it that we often hear from supporters of stricter copyright laws? Oh yeah...

When we first discovered Jamendo more than 5 years ago the site was hosting 500 albums, mostly from French artists.

Fast forward to today and Jamendo features work from 38,000 artists from all around the world, who together have published 315,000 tracks across 50,000 albums spanning a wide range of genres.

Impressive statistics that easily beat some established record labels.

For years, Brazil has been a very interesting country to watch on copyright issues. It embraced Creative Commons early on.

The government seemed to really care about understanding what works and what does not work in copyright law.

After various discussions, there were serious proposals that would seek to elevate the importance of fair use and the public domain.

There was even a proposal to legalize file sharing.

We've written a few times in the past about Flat World Knowledge, a textbook publisher that really seems to have embraced the sort of business models we discuss.

It gives away digital versions (the infinitely abundant kind) of its textbooks for free, but charges for the scarcities, such as printed copies.

If you've been following the goings on in Egypt over the past week, it's likely that you at least saw some of Al Jazeera's rather comprehensive coverage.

The Egyptian government was so annoyed by the coverage that it "shut down" Al Jazeera's Egyptian offices (and Egyptian politicians are calling for trying Al Jazeera correspondents as "traitors").

There hasn't been too much case law around the legitimacy of Creative Commons licenses, and some have questioned whether or not they're really legitimate.

I'll admit that I do have some questions about certain aspects of CC licenses, but over in Belgium a court has pretty clearly claimed that Creative Commons licenses are perfectly legitimate.

An anti-piracy group has caused a storm of controversy by taking down movies it has no rights to. GVU successfully ordered video hosting site Vimeo to take down several Creative Commons videos created by a freelance journalist and an independent filmmaker.

The anti-piracy tracking company hired by GVU claims that its technology failed.

An anti-piracy group working in Germany has stirred controversy by wrongfully taking down videos that neither it nor its clients hold the copyrights to.

Igor Zevaka was the first of a few of you to point to John Green's video where he discusses the Viacom/YouTube lawsuit with a bit of a twist, highlighting the fact that Viacom is making money off of amatuer content, without the rights to do so.

At TorrentFreak we keep a close eye on the DMCA takedown requests that are received by search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

These are usually sent out by music and film companies but last week we saw them being joined by the Gawker Media-owned weblog Gizmodo.