In Italy, commercial shops can diffuse some music without paying collecting societies. Labels and services like Beatpick.com, Jamendo Pro, Liberius and Filozero offer free music, some right reserved licenses and consultancies for this scope. You can pay from zero to less than half you would have paid passing through collecting societies. Read more »

Cadyou is a community launched by Tom Moor in late 2008 whose goal is to create an archive of free, high quality 3D and CAD files for everyone to use, available in the Public Domain and under Creative Commons licenses. Read more »

On May 26th, 2009, on Yahoo’s Search Blog, Polly Ng and Anuj Sahai announced the addition of CC license image filtering options to their image search and also explained why CC licenses are so important for finding images online. Read more »

On 4th April 2009, WFMU celebrated the launch of its new website, The Free Music Archive, open to the public in its beta version.

From FMA’s Jason Sigal:

Every track [on the FMA] will be offered in high-quality without restrictions, registration, advertisements or fees. Many grant additional rights under Creative Commons agreements, making the FMA a valuable resource for podcasters, video producers, remix artists, and others in search of legal audio.  […] Radio has always offered free access to curated audio, and the Free Music Archive is a continuation of that purpose designed for the Internet era.

Since there is so much content on the site, the FMA is featuring particular curators such as WFMU, KEXP, and dublab.

So go register an account, and start downloading some of the 5,000 tracks already posted, or search by license type (special kudos to WFMU for incorporating some non-standard license search options here), and help one of the world’s greatest independent stations thrive on the net!

MediaWiki developers are working on integrating OpenStreetMap (Osm) (la versione libera di Google Maps) with Wikipedia and all other their projects. A fundamental step for development of both communities, that can free users from dependency from proprietary geodata, now almost an exclusive property of TeleAtlas. We hope that public administrations will become sensible and that will give their data to the free platform. Otherwise lets ask for a law that will oblige them to release geodata in the public domain. Read more »