"Performance rights organization (PRO) ASCAP is now pondering ways to defuse the influence of non-traditional copyright thinkers, according to correspondence shared Thursday with Digital Music News.

"Some very exciting news for authors, publishers, and readers: Today, Google launched a program to enable rightsholders to make their Creative Commons-licensed books available for the public to download, use, remix, and share via Google Books..."

CC0 is a Creative Commons project designed to promote and protect the public domain by 1) enabling authors to easily waive their copyrights in particular works and to communicate that waiver to others, and 2) providing a means by which any person can assert that there are no copyrights in a particular work, in a way that allows others to judge the reliability of that assertion.

Microsoft's insiders in government help raise money for the Obama campaign, which is akin to paying him

Creative Commons organisation has launched a new version of its online tool for helping users choose a licence for their works. They also published second draft of version 4.0 of its suite of Creative Commons licences.

"Radical militant librarians are out to destroy the music industry. Or at least, that’s what you might come to believe if you listen to the RIAA’s arguments. The recording industry and other corporate lobbies have convinced policymakers for decades that intellectual property protections are necessary to motivate the production of creative works.

I am personally a big proponent behind the idea of the Creative Commons movement, which tries to create a free-er multimedia society where listeners, users and remixers build upon original works and freely exchange that information.

"Many people have asked us for information about the lawsuit prepared to be filed in Texas against Virgin Mobile and Creative Commons. The plaintiffs of the lawsuit are the parents of a student whose image in a CC-licensed photograph was used by Virgin Mobile in an advertising campaign and the photographer who took the original picture of the student and posted it on Flickr.

As Microsoft is chided by the media and in the blogosphere about its decision to hire comedian Jerry Seinfeld as the new Vista spokesperson, I ponder just who the Linux community would hire as their representative.