open...

Even though Creative Commons licenses have only been in existence for just over a decade, it's now hard to imagine the online world ...

The whole point about adopting Creative Commons licenses is to make it easier for people to share and use works released under them. S...

As Techdirt noted last year, France has a regrettable habit of dreaming up really bad ideas when it comes to the Internet, most famously...

The European Union's governmental machine is a complicated beast, with its intertwining of supra-national, national and party-politic...

As Techdirt observed back in 2007, Brazilian artists were some of the first to recognize that piracy can be a positive force that helps ...

It would be hard to overstate the contribution of Richard Stallman to the digital world. The founding of the GNU project and the creatio...

Creative Commons (CC) has been with us for nearly a decade, so you would have thought people might understand it by now. Apparently not, ...

There have been a number of stories on Techdirt recently about governments diminishing the public domain - not just by extending copyrigh...

OpenCourseWare - putting texts and videos of educational lectures online for anyone to download, use and often build on - is a great idea.  ...

For many years, Brazil has been a shining beacon of how to do it right when it came to openness and sharing. For example, in the field of o...

I recently wrote about the suggestion that a "Great Firewall of Europe" should be created - a fine example of political cluelessn...

As a former publisher (no, really) I am fascinated by, and sympathetic to, efforts to come up with new models for profitable publishing in t...

Talking of commons, I was reading David Bollier's Viral Spiral recently, probably the best book about the rise of the commons as a new...

Here's a variety of "sharing" I'd not come across before: private label rights. This is what Wikipedia has to say on the...

As readers of this blog will doubtless know, Richard Stallman's great stroke of genius at the founding of the GNU project was to use cop...

Well, of course you can – free software is the primary demonstration of that. But that doesn't mean it's trivial to turn free into f...

It's hard enough working out what collaboration might mean with words, but even it's even worse with images. This probably explains...

Not earth shattering, but a further vindication of the Creative Commons idea: We are always looking for ways to make it easier for you to f...

Flatworld , a open textbook publishing company, has finally come out of private beta. Here's what makes it different : We preserve the ...

One of the interesting applications of openness has been to education. The potential is plain: why re-invent the wheel when it comes to cre...