Professor William Fisher’s new book, ‘Promises to keep’ is out. Fisher has some incredible ideas about alternative compensation systems in the era of the Internet. I met him at Harvard University’s iLaw conference last year, where he presented some of his ideas. Check out the book here. And read more about how we might […]

‘There’s a battle going on at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) — one that could accurately be described as a struggle for the soul of the organization. The central question is whether WIPO will coninue to promote the protection of intellectual property for its own sake — IP “uber alles” — or, as a […]

Vincent Maher has written a great article on Wired’s Creative Commons CD.

Chris Bester, our resident legal expert, has written an excellent commentary on the LIO judgement. There are definitely a host of different opinions on the judgement - a great one from the freedom of expression perspective comes from Carmel Rickard on the Sunday Times online.
‘The legal battle between South African Breweries (SAB) and Laugh-it-Off Promotions […]

The LINK Centre at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg has been named the proud host of Creative Commons in South Africa! Check back here to find details about the licensing process.

Thomas Goetz, Wired Magazine Articles Editor, spoke to Creative Commons South Africa about the Creative Commons licensed CD that they’re launching in November.
Why did Wired decide to support this initiative?
Creative Commons licenses could be part of what the music industry needs to shake out of this stalemate between extreme restrictions and all out anarchy. Wired […]

Unbelieveable?
I came across this wonderful story about Mexicans around the world coming together earlier this month to celebrate 150 years of their national anthem. They hoped that it would unite a country defeated and divided, in part by the loss of half of its territory to the United States in 1848. The article goes on […]

‘Developing Nations Copyright License Frees Creativity Across the Digital Divide‘ Creative Commons press release

What wonderful news! After months of public discussion and legal debate, Creative Commons launched the ‘developing nations license‘ at the Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue’s workshop on “The Future of WIPO,” in Geneva last week.
The ‘developing nations license’ allows copyright holders to invite a wide range of royalty-free uses of their work in developing nations while […]

The Folk Den is a repository of Roger McGuinn’s performances of traditional songs in the United States. From the website:
‘The purpose of this page is to use the medium of the World Wide Web to continue the tradition of the folk process, that is the telling of stories, and singing of songs, passed on from […]

I’ll be talking at the Highway Africa conference in Grahamstown about the role of Creative Commons in new media publishing tomorrow. Check out the daily Highway Africa paper, ‘Open Source‘ here.

This week I am speaking with women from across the SADC region who are gathered in Johannesburg to learn about practical implementation of FOSS (free and open source software) and open content in their organisations. They were very interested to hear about Creative Commons as a solution to more restrictive, default copyright rules governing the […]

Magnatune.com, an online record label that makes music available free for non-commercial use under Creative Commons licenses, and pretty cheaply for commercial use, has 3 South African artists on its site.
Mr Gelatine (aka Jean-Pierre Gouws) lives and works in Cape Town and serves up diverse styles of delicious electronica in his Electroluv album.
Indidginus, […]