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.