Lessig's opener

Even though, as he said at the beginning of his talk just now, Larry Lessig is not accustomed to speaking for just fifteen minutes, he managed to cram in quite a lot.

First, he talked about what Creative Commons had been doing over the last year. After a long debate with the famously dogmatic founder of the free software movement, Richard Stallman, Lessig announced that Creative Commons were changing the way the CC licence logo looks to make the freedoms they represent more obvious. He also announced the internationalisation of the CC Publisher and CC Mixter technology.

But CC is not about the Creative Commons organisation, and Lessig was quick to move on to other people's projects which involved the licences, either by remixing material already licenced CC, or by simply using CC to release work. Projects he picked out were Colin Mutchler's new album, the Pearl Jam video, the freedom toasters and the Diesal U Music contest.

A lot of the focus was on business, and Lessig mentioned several new businesses emerging around CC - scoopt, dot sub, eyespot, as well as explaining the new cc tool designed into Microsoft office. His big announcement was that Brazillian news agency, Radiobras, would be using CC from now on to release newswires. More on this last announcement, which is pretty exciting, was promised later on in the conference.

I feel like I've walked into another world - the activity going on around the CC licences is much more than I'd known about - I can't wait to hear more.