Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.” Today Creative Commons announced that they are looking for summer interns to work […]

Writer and designer Andy Clarke and developer Brian Suda have announced the “soft-boiled” launch of a simple site, TweetCC, to help users set their Creative Commons licensing for Twitter. Clarke was writing a book, in which he was hoping to include some tweets (posts) and avatars from Twitter. His publisher told him, in order to […]

Web-wide business content tracking and programming platform company Attributor has announced the private beta version of FairShare. The program is a free service intended to help help bloggers track their content’s usage throughout the Web – and whether that usage complies with your copyright and licensing requirements. Late last year, Attributor published a report about […]

Do you want to know a secret? Do you promise not to tell? Beatles music is, for the first time, available for download in a podcast from Norwegian Broadcasting. [This of course begs some dumb puns about Norwegian Wood. Isn’t it good? But we digress.] Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) made a 2007 documentary series on “Norgesglasset” […]

The McCain/Palin campaign has found itself caught in a DMCA/Fair Use YouTube battle, after having campaign videos pulled from the site because of their use of copyrighted material. The campaign’s letter, embedded above, makes a great against the over-zealous enforcement of DMCA claims. Let’s hope that politicians getting ensnared in the DMCA/Fair Use battle will […]

The Center for Social Media has released a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video. If you have a vlog, video podcast or post videos to sites like YouTube, knowing about fair use could help keep you from getting sued. Here’s a summary of their recommendations:

The Associated Press, after sending cease and desist letters to the social media site Drudge Retort, plans to release guidelines that explain how much of its articles and media bloggers and Web sites can copy within fair use rights: The A.P.’s effort to impose some guidelines on the free-wheeling blogosphere, where extensive quoting and even […]

The Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP) has published an excellent primer on fair use and copyright in the context of new media. These are topics that podcasters, indie video publishers and bloggers continually struggle with. A recent example is the controversy over the Richter Scales unauthorized use of Lane Hartwell’s photos in a video for […]