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Our September newsletter brings news of success stories fighting DMCA abuse, a grant awarded by the California Consumer Protection Foundation, and our continuing efforts to stop the AT&T-Tmobile merger.

You can also catch us in person at Media Law in the Digital Age in October, a conference coproduced by Harvard Berkman Center's Digital Media Law Project and the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University, as well as Blogworld 2011 in LA in November.

Youtube offers of one out of six Creative Commons licenses, sends mixed messages

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New Media Rights offers legal help to creators on the use of Creative Commons licenses. We were interested to see how Youtube has recently begun to incorporate this progressive licensing structure into their video options. Although we welcome Creative Commons license inclusion into Youtube's service, the way that Youtube has rolled out its CC license options raises serious questions about the future of the online video ecosystem and how "open" that ecosystem will be.

Best Practices for Creative Commons attributions - how to attribute works you reuse under a Creative Commons license

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Find out how to site or source creative commons work. Creative commons work allows you to share, remix and reuse legally, just make sure to check out what license it is under.

“creative commons” by Flikr user libraryman used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license

New Media Guides Legal and How-to guides

Welcome to our Legal and How-to resource center. We hope these guides will help you, the user/creator, to learn about

Rights and laws on the Internet
How to use new technologies and social media in your own life

Lost in Translation: Rosetta Stone sues Google for Trademark infringement

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Rosetta Stone, a foreign language education provider, filed suit against Google in federal court last week for allegedly infringing on the company's trademark. The conflict arose over Google's AdWords program which allows third parties to purchase keywords for advertising purposes. The result is that when a consumer runs a Google search for "Rosetta Stone", their search results will display paid advertisements of competitors as "sponsored links". What do you thingk, trademark infringement or fair competition?

Essential Free and Open Source Software Toolkit

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A tool kit full of Free or Open Source software

Open source software has gained popularity because of its effectiveness, flexibility, security, and low cost. By adopting an entirely new philosophical approach to software development and user freedom, open source software empowers you, the downstream user not just to use it to perform a task, but to build upon, adapt, and modify it to fit your needs. In this way thousands of developers and users around the world are able to work to improve the software's effectiveness, flexibility, and security. Join the many people around the world using open source software, a way of life that encourages openness, sharing, community, innovation, and discovery.

David Bollier

As promised in last week’s post on The Commons Video, here’s an interview with David Bollier, author of Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own, which we said in January “will likely establish itself as a definitive guide for those seeking to understand and discover the key players and concepts in the digital commons.