Very interesting his answer to the question Why do you give most of your typefaces away for free?, in an interview published on “I love typography*”.

There wasn’t really a plan when I made my first typeface Delicious. Because I didn’t study type design, the real challenge was to explore all caveats and find proper solutions to come up with a reasonable looking, working font of my own. Selling it never crossed my mind … It just felt great when people liked it or wanted to use it. It was only after 10 years when I decided to make another face. Fontin still was a typographic exploration which I rather liked to share with people. rather than sell it to them—because I didn’t consider myself a real type designer. Shortly after I finished Fontin my fonts got listed at Vitaly Friedman’s “25 Best Free Quality Fonts” and that’s when things really took off. Many people got to know me and my free fonts and the responses were heart-warming.
Because I had a job and I didn’t have to earn money from my type design hobby, I found it very comfortable to give my fonts away. I could just do what I wanted. No need to create something like extra weights of more italics because of a foundry demanding them. No deadlines… I felt as free as my fonts.

Bibliography

• [berkman] Mapping the global commons, Joho the blog, July 14th, 2009.

In the city of Krasnodar, ElektroHumans destroyers, after recording their demo, are going to distributed the music and the cd album under a Creative Commons license.

Hey all! Our demo is coming soon and we want share it with you. We want it stylish, so we decided to involve the community of free culture artists!

We can’t promise any remuneration, because everything is moved only by pure enthusiasm. We guarantee that every post (except, of
course, spam) will specify the author and the link to the cover of our demo recording.

The resulting product will be completely open and free, in the
spirit of free culture.

We hope for your help and support!

Sincerely,
ElektroHumans destroyers

Project el-ajo.ru, as an information partner, provides and develops the platform for publication and discussion, as open source software. You can also contribute to the code.

The album cover should be asquare image, at least 120mm to 120mm and 300 dpi on a scale of 1:1.
Send an e-mail at truePenguin@el-ajo.ru, with the subject Work for EGU competition, specifying the author(s) and attaching or linking the source file(s). If you prefer, you can add information about the used software or other.

Attention! Send work only if you are the author and if it is distributed
freely (submit a link to confirm).

You can also help by telling your friends about the contest or other
resources. Write in the comments on the competition – all the links
submitted.

Thank you friends, for your understanding, help and support!

Download Record (5 songs), 13,1 Mb »
Page competition »

To filter by CC search, go to Google’s advanced Image Search page and select the options you’d like in the “Usage rights” section. Your results will be restricted to images marked with CC licenses or other compatibly licensed photos. Differently from Yahoo!, Google searches the whole web, not only Flickr.

Remember, Google can only provide search results that its algorithms find tagged with the license you specify; it is your obligation to verify the license of the image you’re using and make sure you’re conforming to its guidelines.

This is a huge step forward for the future of image search on the web, so congratulations to the Google team on another great CC implementation!

With:

Saranno presenti:

• Ostia for africa, Efo&Awa, Granello di Senape, SOS Racism, Amnesty interational, C.I.A.O, Progetto Alina
• Tonio Dell’Olio (responsible of the international sector of Libera association).

One interesting component of Cadyou’s content is its moderation policy:

Unlike many websites which let user upload their own content, cadyou is moderated ensuring that each file made available reaches quality standards, is tagged well and has great thumbnails so it is easy to find what you need.

Sign up today for unlimited free downloads!

Finding a great image online elicits a little thrill, but it can be tricky – if you’re looking for a pic to pop into a presentation or illustrate a Web page, you need to know if you’re allowed to use that photo, and how you can use it. Today, Yahoo! Image Search is launching a Creative Commons license filter that allows you to simply and quickly find images that are available for reuse.

When you use Yahoo! Image Search, you’ll now see a checkbox for Creative Commons allowing you to filter for images from Flickr that can be used commercially or that can be modified (remixed, tweaked, or built upon) with restrictions set by the image’s creator.

Congrats to the Yahoo! team for extending CC even further into their platform!

Forgive me, but a picture (screen shot) is worth a thousand words (searches):

This migration would be a huge boost for the free culture movement, and for Wikipedia and Creative Commons — until the migration happens there is an unnecessary licensing barrier between the most important free culture project (Wikipedia of course, currently under the Free Documentation License, intended for software documentation) and most other free culture projects and individual creators, which use the aforementioned CC BY-SA license.

To qualify to vote, one must have made 25 edits to a Wikimedia site prior to March 15. Make sure you’re logged in to the project on which you qualify, and you should see a site notice at the top of each page that looks like the image below (red outline added around notice).

Click on “vote now” and you’ll be taken to the voting site. [Update: If you see a different site notice, it's because other important notices about the Wikimania conference are rotating with the vote notice. In that case you can go directly to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:SecurePoll/vote/1. For other Wikimedia sites, change en.wikipedia to the domain of the site in question.]

For background on the migration process, see Wikimedia’s licensing update article and the following series of posts on the Creative Commons blog:

• On being a creative commoner
• Wikipedia and attribution
• Wikipedia licensing Q&A posted
• Wikipedia/CC news: FSF releases FDL 1.3
• Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses released
• DRAFT Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses
• Approved for Free Cultural Works
• Wikipedia and Creative Commons next steps
• Progress on license interoperability with Wikipedia

Here’s a great “propaganda poster”, original created by Brianna Laugher (cited a number of times on this blog), licensed under CC BY. See her post, Vote YES for licensing sanity!

Indeed, please go vote yes to unify the free culture movement!

Creative Commons is launching the second and final round of a survey intended to collect information on how people understand the term “noncommercial use”. As previously announced, this study is funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and we are fortunate to have the help of a distinguished group of advisors and colleagues.

During the first phase of the study, which took place last fall, we focused on talking with and surveying creators, using a questionnaire that was fielded to a sample of US-based content creators, and also made available (in an expanded version) to anyone interested. See 1, 2, 3.

Now we want to hear about noncommercial use from the user’s perspective — recognizing of course that the creator/user distinction is itself worthy of study! Whether you consider yourself a member of the Creative Commons community, or are interested more generally in copyright, we hope you will respond. While answering all the questions can take a while, particularly if you have a lot to say, many people who participated last time found it an interesting and useful experience.

Note that we could not incorporate as many suggestions from the previous questionnaire (see comments on posts linked above) as we would have liked due to the structure of the study — we want to be able to compare data from the two phases of research, and to be able to do that, we have to retain the wording of certain concepts and questions.

While to our knowledge this is the first empirical research project to tackle understanding how people define “noncommercial use”, we hope it is only the first of many efforts to explore the many dimensions of the subject. We will release the raw empirical data collected and some early reports from the first (creator) questionnaire next week, and will release a report on the full study and all data this summer. We hope others will be able to mine and build on this data.

If you’ve read this far, we know you have an opinion, and we hope you understand that we’re trying to provide a way for you to share that opinion. What are your views? Please help us make the data set as robust as possible! Take the questionnaire (allow 15-25 minutes), and help us tell others about it.

Questions about the study or this poll may be sent to noncommercial@creativecommons.org.

Mike Linksvayer, Second Round of the Noncommercial Use Study — “User” Questionnaire Launched Creative Commons, April 15th, 2009.

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!