Category: the commons

Creative Commons: copy, remix, share

The Creative Commons “Copy Me/Remix Me” CD is out.

It features a variety of music from an even wider variety of artists. Among the featured musicians, you’ll find record-at-home independents, magnatune and opsound artists, world music groups, and small town rock bands.

All tracks from the CD are available in mp3 format for downloading, listening, sharing, or remixing. Plus, CC held a mini-contest to get remixes for the disc and they’ve posted all of the entries received.

Putting some structure behind the feel-good principles of open source and open content, they will launch their new Sampling Licenses on December 16, 2003. The licences will come in two flavours:

The Sampling License

The Sampling license will let authors invite others to tranform their work, even for commercial purposes, while prohibiting distribution of verbatim copies, or any use in advertising.

For example, an artist could take a photo licensed under Sampling, crop it, and use it in a commercial collage, but she could not distribute simple copies of the whole, original photo. A DJ could borrow elements of a licensed song, royalty-free, and use them in an original piece. He could not, however, put a copy of the tune on a file-sharing network.

The Sampling-Plus License

The Sampling-Plus license will offer the same freedoms as the Sampling license, but will also allow noncommercial sharing of the verbatim work.

So, an artist could release her song under a Sampling-Plus license to encourage her fans to trade it on file-sharing networks, then remix or build upon it however they like. But the license would protect verbatim copies of her work from for-profit exploitation by others. Or a photographer could invite the widespread, noncommercial distribution of a whole photo and its resulting tranformation while preventing others from simply reselling the photo, unchanged.

Good stuff.

Wired Discovers Open Source

Thomas Goetz’s Wired article Open Source Everywhere unsuprisingly positions open source as efficient business practice first, an alternative to the more repressive manifestations of IP second. But I did like this pithy description of how open source might be measured:

think of it as a spectrum or – better still – a rising diagonal line on a graph, where openness lies on one axis and collaboration on the other. The higher an effort registers both concepts, the more fully it can be considered open source.

Despite the hideousness of suggesting that oil companies can benefit from open source science, the article is extended and actually includes some interesting examples of open source creativity and information, including open source film, OpSound, and of course the Wikipedia.

MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT OpenCourseWare has now officially launched with hundreds of online courses. Dilettantes, start your engines! More seriously, there is some really interesting material available, including video “lectures” by staff and guest speakers. Is it just me, or is MIT dead sexy?

MP3.com Abandons all Pretence

An ongoing discussion has emerged in response to a post by Lawrence Lessig about mp3.com’s betrayal of its founding principles (or at least its founding sales pitch to artists). (Thanks to Art Machine for the link to this story.)

Apparently Lessig (the guy behind Creative Commons) received nothing but a brusque ‘cease and desist’ from mp3.com “legal” after sending a cheerful email encouraging the company to think about the potential benefits to artists of Creative Commons licenses.

It should come as no surprise, though. As many of those commenting on Lessig’s post have noted, mp3.com stopped being pioneers of the electronic frontier and started being the railroad company long ago – if you’ll excuse the tired 1990s Wild West metaphors. From its beginnings as an exciting new digital distribution mechanism that promised independent artists a wide audience reach without label contracts and label publicity machines, how could we come to this? Mp3.com sending ‘cease and desist’ letters to Creative Commons, not to mention promoting multinational popstars and instituting a three-tiered star system based entirely on the level of fees paid by artists (you can be a Basic, Gold, or Platinum artist). Saddest of all, I have only just noticed that mp3.com’s artist page now carries the message, “No Basic (Free) Artist signup available at this time.”

Such gratitude to the independent artists who provided the content and traffic that built the business in the first place.

Open Source Music Projects

Creative Commons calls for producers to remix Bm Relocation Program’s song, Superego Exchange. Successful remixes will end up on the next Creative Commons promotional CD. Details here.

Australian youngsters (<25) can do the same and possibly end up getting national airplay via the noise festival remix project. Anyone willing to have a go at remixing Mozart as played by Fourplay can grab the audio files and get stuck into it, deadline 17 October: here’s the link.

The previous round (remixes of The Superjesus, The Herd, Resin Dogs, Bodyjar, Magic Dirt and more) is at the judging stage, and in the meantime go to www.abc.net.au/noise/remix to listen to the round one winners, picked out from the crowd by the original artists themselves.

While you’re there, take a dip in the ocean (trust me, it’s no exaggeration) of other creative work produced by the emerging artists who have been assisted by noise to get out there, be seen and be heard.

Jenny Everywhere

From the My Favourite Things Department…

A bunch of creative people have done something very cool with Tom Coates’ Open Source Comicbook Character meme (see here for the collaboration behind it all). The result is Jenny Everywhere, aka The Shifter:

She’s open source! She’s multidimensional! That’s right, the character of Jenny Everywhere may be used without permission by anyone. And you won’t have any continuity concerns with The Shifter, because… because she shifts.

Though the character of Jenny Everywhere is vague enough to allow for many different interpretations, there are a few things that define who she is. Do all these signifiers need to be represented? Absolutely not. But the fewer that you use, the less likely that your character will be recognized as Jenny Everywhere.

She has short, dark hair. She usually wears aviation goggles on top of her head and a scarf around her neck. Otherwise, she dresses in comfortable clothes. She is average size and has a good body image. She has loads of confidence and charisma. She appears to be Asian or Native American. She has a ready smile.

Not only that but she has very interesting powers, and she’s already used them in an (un)surprisingly wide range of amazing adventures. Go, grrl.

Testing Ownership of Digital Music

Let’s pretend we are deeply naive for a second: when you buy a CD, are you buying the music it contains? Or an aesthetically value-added material object that enables you to access the music? i-Tunes (and other online digital music outlets) would prefer us to believe the former, and the price differential between ludicrously expensive CDs and digital music would appear to bear them out. So, if the one-off “purchase” of a digitally-encoded track is in some way analagous to the purchase of a CD, then surely the purchaser has the right to subsequently transfer ownership, right? However counter-intuitive (and possibly silly) it might seem, 90% Crud has decided to test this twisted logic out by offering an m4p bought through i-Tunes for auction on ebay. It will cause a stir (well, here I am blogging it) and probably is an interesting, if unsophisticated, test of the legal limits of DRM, but will probably only help the lumbering carcass of the record industry to refine the purchase model – they will never ever let go of the idea that music is a thing that can be owned, bought, and licensed, when of course it isn’t a “thing” at all, but an experience.

As an aside, the alternative to the “purchase” model of course is the “pay per listen” one – far more creepy.

[update 05/09/03]: As a commenter to this post pointed out (see below), I need to account for the special nature of the i-tunes DRM system, which includes a swag of copy-protection measures, therefore making George’s experiment a bit less silly (the file cannot be infinitely reproduced and distributed, so the analogy to a CD purchase is not so far-fetched). Mac-Rumours has a good summary of the i-tunes model (although I admit it is possibly a little out of date–I’ll find a fresher version when I have time).

George’s i-tunes track reaches $15,000 on ebay

George’s iTunes m4p has reached a bid of $15,000 on ebay. Either there are a lot of wingnuts putting in bids for fun, or someone is really really committed to some fuzzily formulated anti-hegemonic principle or other. Either that, or someone really, really, wants a totally non-unique inferior-quality compressed recording of Double Dutch Bus by Devin Vasquez. With all funds going to the EFF, though, good on ‘em.

[update: 05/09/03]: apparently someone made a bid of $99 million before ebay removed the listing due to violation of their downloadable items policy. Get the story from George.

RIAA tactics revealed

From BBC NEWS:

The music industry’s methods of tracking down suspected music pirates have been revealed for the first time. Using digital fingerprints, or “hashes”, investigators say they can tell if an MP3 file was downloaded from an unauthorised service. The industry also tracks “metadata” tags, which provide hidden clues about how files were created. The details were given by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in a legal case against a suspected pirate.

Dyke to open up BBC archive

I’ll leave the puns about the title alone and just send hurrahs to the BBC for this. The BBC has announced plans to give the public full access to all the corporation’s programme archives, that is, digitally – the service, the BBC Creative Archive will be available to everyone not trying to turn a dollar out of it. Director General Mr. Dyke sez: “‘I believe that we are about to move into a second phase of the digital revolution, a phase which will be more about public than private value; about free, not pay services; about inclusivity, not exclusion. In particular, it will be about how public money can be combined with new digital technologies to transform everyone’s lives. “