CC book lasts for four week on NYTimes Bestseller List

This is interesting. Cory Doctorow's book, Little Brother has been on the bestseller list of the New York Times for four weeks in a row. The book is released under a Creative Commons license, which means that you can download and read it for free. If is is available for free, why would people buy it in the bookstores and send it to the NYTimes bestseller list?

Cory is a great guy and a wonderful speaker on the subject of Creative Commons and open content. I heard him speak at the first Red Hat Summit in Nashville in 2006. At the Summit, he explained that, as an author, his biggest problem was obscurity and that releasing his books under a Creative Commons license helped him overcome that.

At that time, I thought that was an interesting explanation, but this is excellent proof of what he said two years ago! I'd encourage you to listen to his 2006 talk at the Red Hat Summit and recommend that you download it in the OGG format, which is an open format.

Creative Commons India launch

Spent yesterday with Joichi Ito, Catharina Maracke and our very own Lawrence Liang doing press interviews for the launch of Creative Commons India. The launch function was pulled off well by Shishir Jha, who is the project lead and the KRESIT auditorium at IIT Bombay was packed for this event. Since I am an ex-journalist, I volunteered to coordinate this for CC India and I really enjoyed the experience. Joichi is the Chairman of CC worldwide and I was surprised to see that he is so young. For his age, he has accomplished a lot. The interviews went off really well and I learnt a lot from listening to Joichi and Lawrence. Both of them were the star speakers at the launch of CC India that was held on 26th January, which is India's Republic Day.

The launch functions and the interviews went off really well and I hope to see the interviews appearing soon.