ReadWriteWeb

If SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) passes, artists online will be at risk - especially if Big Media has anything to say about it.

Under SOPA, websites can be blacklisted and removed from the Internet if they appear to be infringing on intellectual property or distributing copyrighted works. This is especially troublesome for artists whose work depends on fair use law and resides at the intersection of art, mass media critique and appropriation.

If you've been living under an Internet-free rock the past couple of weeks, you might have managed to miss the steady drumbeat of opposition to HR 3261, the so-called Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Then again, if you've been living under an Internet-free rock, you've already had a preview of what we're facing if SOPA goes into effect.

I'm exaggerating a little, but not by much. We've covered SOPA earlier this week and the EFF's efforts to rally opposition to the bill. But today is American Censorship Day and a hearing for the bill in the U.S. House that's stacked in favor of the bill.

Yahoo-owned photo sharing service Flickr may have been eclipsed by Facebook as the world's most popular photo sharing site, but there are some things Facebook is probably never going to be able to pull off. For one thing, the creation of a giant public repository of rights-liberal photos available for re-use. Flickr announced today that it has hit 200 million Creative Commons licensed photos, making it the world's largest CC photo collection. Creative Commons is a series of easy-to-use licenses that communicate the conditions that your creative work may be re-used under without asking you explicit permission. (E.g. "with attribution," "for non-commercial use," "no derivatives.")

What's so great about CC photos? For one thing, they are an incredible boon for follow-on creativity. Creativity, the good people of Creative Commons argue, always builds on the past. In a read-write world on the web, the less we're slowed down by standard copyright when it isn't applicable (when we want to share our work with people freely) then the more our photos, music and writing can serve as a platform for explorers who would go further regarding the topics we've engaged with and published on.

YouTube announced Creative Commons licensing options for videos hosted on the site today, making it much easier to use and share videos with legal attribution.

Creative Commons on YouTube will allow users to splice clips or scenes from other videos through the YouTube Video Editor. Copyright and Creative Commons can be a tricky area as there are several different Creative Commons options. YouTube tries to make it easy by using only one -- CC BY 3.0 -- that permits users to share and adapt content for commercial use provided that attribution is given to the original creator.

Qatar-based news service Al Jazeera has a long relationship with Creative Commons licensing. Now, for its coverage of the Egyptian uprising, it has released photographs via Flickr and video on a CC license.

Available photographs and video are available for free use so long as the user gives attribution and does not alter the products. For the record, all the photographs and video in this post are from Al Jazeera.

Creative Commons announced the release of the Public Domain Mark today, a tool that will help easily identify those works that are free of copyright restrictions. The mark - the letter C that's associated with the symbol for copyright, but with a slash through it - is meant to make it clear that the material is free to reuse.

Works are part of the public domain when their copyright expires or when the artist designates the work as such. This means that people can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work - even for commercial purposes, without asking permission.

"Sharing" may be one of the key elements of our digital world - sharing files, sharing links, sharing content. But has the emphasis on sharing online changed the way in which we share offline?

Results of a study by Shareable Magazine and Latitude Research (led by Kim Gaskins) contend that indeed it has. A survey of over 500 Web users finds that people who share online are more apt to share offline, in part the study argues, because they've learned to trust each other online.

Creative Commons is announcing today its Catalyst Campaign, an effort taking place from today until June 30, to raise money for its recently-launched Catalyst Grants program.

The campaign is an attempt to raise seed funding for projects worldwide that are "devoted to increasing access and openness" and could be an opportunity for a variety of startups.

The Instructional Technology Council recently released a report on the trends in distance education and online learning at community colleges. Among its findings: Enrollment in distance education courses increased by over 20%, while overall community college enrollment increased by less than 2%. Clearly online learning offers many opportunities to students, teachers and academic institutions. But what are the opportunities for entrepreneurs?

Looking to spruce up that bland PowerPoint presentation for your next meeting with possible investors? Or do you need high-quality photographs for your product's homepage or blog? Lifehacker recently profiled Sprixi, a free use image search engine, is an excellent source for finding just the right image to add those finishing touches.

Developed by Sydney, Australia-based company Thirsty Minds, Sprixi crawls Flickr and OpenClipArt.org for images licensed under Creative Commons and implements a user-based recommendation system to produce relevant results. While viewing photos, you can tell Sprixi whether or not an image is a useful result. Based on this data, Sprixi displays the most relevant images as rated by users at the top of the results.