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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,…
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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…
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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?
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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…
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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 (
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…