ReadWriteWeb

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.

If I see another screencast using the iMovie default songs, I'm going to go nuts. Music sets the tone for how you want others to perceive your company and choosing a generic soundtrack is like branding yourself boring. In the past, videographers were forced to work with lawyers to gain appropriate licenses for samples. Thanks to the Free Music Archive and a number of other services, we're free to use original songs while still maintaining the rights to attribution. This morning's launch of the Free Music Archive's guest curation series further expands on this environment of collaboration.

An all-star team is forming at StatusNet, the open microblogging service for businesses and communities. The newest addition is Jon Phillips, former community and business development manager for Creative Commons.

Phillips joins Brion Vibber, who came from the Wikimedia Foundation where he served as chief technology officer.

The Free Software Foundation's Defective By Design campaign just added the Amazon Kindle to its list of DRM-related offenders. The organization started a petition against Amazon for restricting readers' access to their own books and effectively discouraging reading options. Complaints include Amazon's switch to publisher-controlled text-to-speech disabling and the removal of several pre-purchased works from the device. Most recently, 17-year-old Justin Gawronski filed suit against the company for removing George Orwell's 1984 from his Kindle and rendering his electronic notes worthless.

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.

Need to get the creative juices flowing? Put down the peyote and pick up your laptop. Ficly is a collaborative writing community where members can buck their writer's block and contribute to shared works of fiction. Armed with 1,024 characters, Ficly users issue story challenges, start new story stubs and add sequels and prequels to existing stories. It's a grade school English exercise without the bullies.

Yahoo Image Search got a nice update today that allows users to filter search results by Creative Commons (CC) license.

For now, this search only includes CC-licensed images from Flickr, Yahoo's own photo sharing service. The Yahoo Image Search interface actually turns out to be a very nice gateway to the CC-licensed image collection on Flickr, especially because the previews update immediately after you change a filter setting.

ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom with headquarters in Manhattan. ProPublica's newsroom employs 32 journalists and receives financing from the Sandler Foundation and other contributions. The organization's mission is to continue the tradition of investigative journalism at a time where a lot of newspaper organizations have had to cut back on their newsroom operations. The really interesting thing here, though, is that ProPublica is giving away all of its content to other newspapers and online publishers for free under a non-commercial, no-derivatives Creative Commons license.

Recently, the Wikimedia Foundation proposed that the copyright licensing terms on its wikis be changed to include a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license in addition to its longstanding GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The proposal was approved by a 75 percent majority of community voters as announced this week.

The change will apply to all text and multimedia content, including video, images, and audio now licensed under GFDL 1.2 or later versions and will increase "the compatibility and availability of free content," according to the WMF site.

Thanks to a new Facebook application from Creative Commons that launched today, Facebook users can now place a Creative Commons license badge on their Facebook profile pages. The badge explains the type of license users have chosen for their photos, videos, and/or status updates. Installing the app and choosing a license is about as easy as it gets, though it is important to note that this is a blanket license and that it is currently not possible to choose a CC license for specific photos or videos.

The Creative Commons Blog today announced that the Wikipedia community is holding a vote to move to using Creative Commons for its primary content license. The license being discussed is CC BY-SA or Attribution-ShareAlike. Although Wikipedia is already covered by the Gnu Free Documentation License (or GFDL), which is similar (and was the best available choice at the time Wikipedia got started), it contains some 'potentially onerous provisions' according to the Wikimedia Licensing Update page.

On the internet, there are a number of places you can go to get free music, but when it comes to free, legal music, there just aren't as many options. That's why it's exciting when something like The Free Music Archive opens its doors. Having just launched into beta, this site, a project of WFMU, one of the most popular freeform radio stations in America, aims to provide a platform for free public access to new music. At the FMA, they've created an online archive where there are currently 5000 free tracks available for download in a variety of genres.

Flickr now holds the world's largest repository of Creative Commons-licensed images, but according to a new study, most Flickr users opt to license their images under the most restrictive CC license. Also, only a relatively small number of users (24%) allow commercial use of their images, and only about 12% of users choose the BY license, which allows for free sharing and remixing, as long as the author is attributed.

Did you know that written, scientific or artistic content you create is automatically put under copyright protection under US law - whether you want it to be copyrighted or not? That's not good for a culture of collaboration and building on each others' work - quite the opposite in fact.

Today, the Creative Commons Foundation is announcing a new tool called CC Zero. CC Zero isn't another legal license from the group, instead it's a legal tool that lets content creators give up the rights claims they are given by default and instead send their work into the public domain.

Attributor Corp. announced a collaboration with Creative Commons today to offer a free service to anyone wishing to track their content on-line. The service is called FairShare. Provide FairShare with an RSS feed of your content and the service will compare it to billions of indexed pages around the web.

Digital copyright reformer turned high-profile anti-corruption activist Lawrence Lessig announced today that he's leaving Stanford and returning to his previous employer, Harvard Law. Lessig will work on anti-corruption issues from there. Lessig was the founder of the Creative Commons Foundation and many hoped he'd take a position in the Obama administration.

We've covered his latest move in greater depth over at Jobwire, our site tracking hires in tech, new media and related industries. Join us there for more details on Lessig's latest career change.

Film director Jesse Dylan, the co-creator of the Emmy award winning Barack Obama support video Yes We Can has released a new work, this time explaining the Creative Commons Foundation's science initiative, Science Commons.

Dylan, who coincidentally is the eldest son of folk legend Bob Dylan, uses his familiar style to aggregate a quick selection of scientists explaining why a web-based revision of copyright policy is so important for the advancement of scientists. "Scientists are the ultimate remixers," one interviewee says, and we agree that Creative Commons in science is a very exciting idea.

With the relative freedom provided by laptops, mobile devices, and more affordable transportation, people have become more migratory and, yet, better at remaining connected - or at the very least, accessible. Nowhere is this more evident than in the tech sector, where individuals are jetting back and forth to attend events or meet up with coworkers halfway across the world.

And when it comes to keeping track of the techie crowd and their travels, Dopplr is one of the best resources around. Now, they're giving users a view into some of those travel patterns with Dopplr city pages.