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Earlier this morning Google Books announced a program where rights owners would be given the option to modify their copyright licenses and specify them as Creative Commons (CC) works. The initiative allows writers, artists and publishers to mark their books with one of 6 CC version 3 licenses, a public domain license or the CC "no rights reserved" license.

In addition to gaining a slew of information on your rights as a content owner, Creative Commons (CC) is offering new members
another great incentive. In exchange for buying a $50 annual membership, the organization is offering donors the chance to use their network log-in as their OpenID. In other words, if you're the type of person who shares their content for the good of education, art and humanity, now you can wear it like a badge across the networks you frequent.

Earlier this morning we reported on the AP's new content tracking system and already we're seeing the blogosphere light up with cries of nefarious intent. Nevertheless, just to prove that content tracking may not always be about serving DMCA take down notices, Creative Commons featured the Tynt Tracer tool in a morning blog post.

According to a study published in The Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, patents may be harming our ability to innovate. Patents and the Regress of Useful Arts, written by Bill Tomlinson of UC Irvine and Andrew Torrance of University of Kansas School of Law, tested the hypothesis with a game called PatentSim. The game is an online simulation of a pure patent system, a patent-free commons system, and a mixed system. Within each environment, first year university students were asked to license, assign, infringe, and enforce patents. The study found that while a mixed patent environment and pure patent environment did not offer substantially different results, students in a commons system generated significantly higher rates of innovation, productivity and social utility. Essentially, the study supports what Lawrence Lessig and free culture advocates have been saying for years: a society free from intellectual property monopolies is a society that is better off.

According to research group Ipsos Reid's "Social Networking: 2009" poll, Canadians are flocking to social networking sites. In the last 18 months, the percentage of Canucks with a social networking profile has increased from 39% to 56%. This rapid rise in social networking users has Canadian marketers scratching their heads as to how they can best brand in the space. With more than three quarters of those online owning a Facebook profile, it's not surprising that the blue beast is the main topic of discussion in relation to marketing groups. Says report writer Mark Laver, "Online social networks tend to be extremely personal and this thus creates a dilemma for marketers and businesses - how to communicate in a personalized setting without upsetting the target audience."

Screen cast videos are one of the most powerful ways to show off anything on the web. They are also quite difficult to do well. That sounds like a pretty sweet spot for specialization and sure enough, a new class of freelancers is emerging to fill the demand.

In this post we look at the work of four of our favorite screen casting freelancers. We think you'll enjoy their work and we hope that you can point us to some still undiscovered people making this kind of magic.