PUBLIC MARKS from mbertier with tag commons

When someone wants to license your art, characters, photos, articles or music, how does it shake out? Chances are that these negotiations involve expensive lawyers on both sides of the deal. If you're running an enlightened company, you might have a Creative Commons license hanging out there for non-commercial, "fannish" uses. (Creative Commons publishes a suite of widely adopted licenses that allow rightsholders to release their work for sharing, remixing, etc.) But somewhere between Creative Commons and full-blown, lawyerly license negotiation is a rich, untapped source of income for creative people and firms with portfolios of iconic material. To cash in, you just need the courage to let go of a little control. Read on...

Because of the important work Creative Commons accomplished over the past year, Google has decided again to donate $30,000 to their cause. Here's an update on some of the awesome work they've been doing:

This site currently contains more than 50,000 searchable text pages and 40,000 images of both publications and handwritten manuscripts. There is also the most comprehensive Darwin bibliography ever published and the largest manuscript catalogue ever assembled. More than 150 ancillary texts are also included, ranging from secondary reference works to contemporary reviews, obituaries, published descriptions of Darwin's Beagle specimens and important related works for understanding Darwin's context.

Torrents for public domain movies.

Kudos to Yahoo!, who today released two pieces of goodness into the commons. The first is their UI library, and the second is their Design Patterns Library.