The Creative Commons and intellectual property movement just got a new face - or rather they just got a place to put their faces, a new book from Joi Ito that features his freesoul portraits. The concept of “freesoul” comes from Lawrence Lessig and Ito’s group of portraits of people came about so that his friends pictures could be have CC licenses and be used on sites like wikipedia and in articles. Ito’s book is called FREESOULS and beyond the creative commons portraits of people (you can see one above), there are also essays from the likes of Lessig, Howard Rheingold, Yochai Benkler, Isaac Mao, Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Liang and Marko Ahtisaari.

Ito has been posting his freesouls on his Flickr account for some time now but the chance to make a CC book allowed for more creative uses of the internet:

As we worked on this project, we became more and more ambitious. Luckily, Christopher is also quite a hacker and we were able to use Socialtext, Flickr and Google Docs to efficiently manage the book editing process. Christopher even wrote a python script using the Flickr API to manage the images and categories for the book.

The book will be released in “3 editions: a boxed set, a limited and numbered edition and a general release. One or all of these will be available on Amazon starting in the fall.”

So keep your eye out for the book, and takepart to learn more about Creative Commons.

Also - indulge in one of my favorite activities - people watching - and check out some of Ito’s FREESOULS :

• http://flickr.com/photos/joi/tags/freesouls/

Read on:

• FREESOULS: Captured and Released by Joi Ito
• Joi Ito’s Freesouls: a book of CC-licensed portraits of, and essays by, copyfighter
• Joi Ito Takes Lead At Creative Commons