Electrobel

Matt Haughey, January 29th, 2004

This week’s featured content is Electrobel, a massive music community site for Belgian electronic music of all genres. There are over 2000 Creative Commons licensed tracks available for streaming and downloading. The site has an impressive array of features as well. Check out music by genre, by artist, or by song (the little diskette icon will let you download a song) and you can even leave comments for the artist on the songs you like. It’s a great way for DJs to share songs with each other and get comments and also a great way to hear new music for users. I keep coming back to the hip-hop section, fascinated by rhymes fast and hard in a language I can’t speak.

The creativity explosion on Mars

Matt Haughey, January 27th, 2004

There’s a nice piece in the NYTimes about the increased levels of public participation in recent Mars landings. A big part of the reason is that given a large, interested population with broadband connections, NASA officials have done their best to share every bit of data, image, and video they can online, and as a result thousands of websites have cropped up including those by laymen colorizing images and even weblogs written from the rover’s point of view.

Thanks to NASA sharing every bit of information they can online, the experience of watching the Mars landing and exploration for students and observers today is a far cry from the days of the moon landing. Instead of a one-way communication delivered by grainy video on television, we have an interactive, two-way process where the viewer can help scientists on the other side of the globe and take in information along with millions of others, sharing their own interpretations online.

Fusedspace contest

Matt Haughey, January 27th, 2004

An interesting contest has just opened for entries, called Fusedspace. “An international design competition on innovative applications for new technology in the public domain” is how they describe themselves but keep in mind the term “public domain” in this case is more specific to public spaces. The contest is set to give away over 17 thousand Euros in prize money for the best proposals that meld public spaces, technology, art, and community. Entry deadline is April 30th.

City art and CC licenses

Matt Haughey, January 27th, 2004

Over at the blog “A Month Full Of Wednesdays” I noticed a post describing a recent Minneapolis call for music and video to play in stations and a recent call for artwork for Cleveland’s public transit. The post mentions an idea to extend Cleveland art requests to include audio for use in stations and the transit authority’s hold system.

The author mentions that Creative Commons licenses would be a good idea to level the playing field and allow the municipal companies to share the music with others on their site freely. We can’t help but agree; these projects calling for artwork, music, and video for public transportation ask creators to contribute their work for the good of the community, much like our licenses do for the good of a greater culture.

Versioning — Public Review Begins

Glenn Otis Brown, January 26th, 2004

As we announced last week, we’re getting ready to roll out Version 2.0 of the eleven original Creative Commons licenses. Review a draft of v2.0 of the by-nc-sa license (from which all other licenses are composed) and let us know what you think. It’ll be up until Feb. 15, and we may make updates in the meantime — we’ll let you know.

A review of the changes, with directions to the relevant section:

• Warranties will now be a matter of choice for the licensor. See Section 5a.
• The attribution clause will include a link-back requirement simliar to the one previously discussed here. Licensees will only be required to link back to licensors if (1) it’s reasonably practical to do so; (2) the licensor actually specifies a URI; (3) that URI actually points to license information about the work. See Section 4d.
• The Share Alike provision will be more flexible. The provision will allow licensees to license resulting derivative works under Creative Commons licenses that feature the same license restrictions/permissions, including future and iCommons versions of the same license. The Share Alike provision will also be clearer about what happens when different kinds of Share Alike content is mixed together (e.g., How to license a collage made from an SA photograph combined with an NC-SA photograph). See Section 4b.
• Ideas for creating compatibility between our SA license and the GNU FDL are coming soon. We’ll post here and to the cc-licenses list when it’s ready.

Thanks.

The first new social movement of the century?

Matt Haughey, January 24th, 2004

The New York Times Magazine mentions Creative Commons in a long piece about copyright reform this week. The article seems to be aimed at a general overview of the movement and forgets a few key details, like Richard Stallman being the man behind Copyleft.

Nice survey of the sampling scene

Matt Haughey, January 24th, 2004

Victor Stone, previously mentioned here for his great remixes on our last CD, recently signed onto Magnatune with a plethora of remixed tracks from Magnatune itself.

He also recently launched a site dedicated to sharing tips and reviews of the software he uses when creating music. A post definitely worth sharing here is the one about sampling, aimed at other turntablists: “Where the Samples Are.” He covers the legal way to acquire rights to use commercial samples, how and where to find Creative Commons licensed samples and what benefits they provide, and lastly how to simply pilfer commerical samples and what the consequences might be.

Discovering Dickens

Glenn Otis Brown, January 24th, 2004

Stanford is bringing back its popular Discovering Dickens community reading project — another example of what’s possible with a healthy public domain. (In other words, don’t try this with anything much more modern.)

In December 2002, Stanford’s Discovering Dickens project began with the serial release of Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations. By the time the project concluded in April, 2003, it had enjoyed success far beyond what we had anticipated. Interest in the project, which has attracted participants from around the country and around the world, has remained keen, and we are happy to announce our next project: Discovering Dickens 2004.

Between January 9 and April 16, 2004, Discovering Dickens will rerelease the facsimile of Dickens’ famous novel of the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities. In April, 1859, the first serialized part of A Tale of Two Cities provided the lead piece for Dickens’ new periodical All the Year Round. On the strength of this weekly serial, contemporary Victorian readership had swollen to 100,000 before the novel concluded in November, 1859.

Dickens himself played an interesting role in international copyright’s development, back in the day when the U.S. was a pirate nation. (1, 2, 3.)

Spontaneous Remix Culture — Yeagh!

Mike Linksvayer, January 23rd, 2004

Take an entertaining and compelling soundbite, easy to use digital audio tools, and cheap bandwidth, what do you get? Spontaneous remix culture.

DeanGoesNuts.com has in a few days collected dozens of remixes of Howard Dean’s 2004 Iowa Caucus concession speech culminating in the infamous “yeagh!” utterance.

While the curator (a Dean supporter) has licensed the site using the Creative Commons Attribution license, permissions associated with the remixes themselves are uncertain. The site’s upcoming submissions policy should include a licensing requirement to clear this up.

Pump Audio

Matt Haughey, January 22nd, 2004

Independent musicians looking for a way to get paid for their work might want to check out Pump Audio. They serve as a marketplace of independent music for film, tv, and radio, representing thousands of independent artists. The thing that really makes them stand out is that they don’t assert control of an artist’s copyright, instead signing non-exclusive licenses that last for a year or two. [via Scott Andrew]