CC Talks With
2008 October
CC Talks With: SomeRightsReserved
SomeRightsReserved is the digital publishing platform for creative cooperative KithKin, a group of designers and creatives who are attempting to take a “genuine passion for inspiring people and celebrating creativity” and turn it into something tangible. Discussed earlier here, SRR are not only producing some fantastic products but are similarly experimenting with licensing in ways that challenge traditional design practices. We recently caught up with Ian Atkins, founder of KithKin/SRR, to get a better sense of how SomeRightsReserved functions as an organization, how they use CC licensing, and their plans for the future.
Can you give our readers some background on what SomeRightsReserved does? What makes you different from other design firms?
SomeRightsReserved is our digital publishing platform. It features a wide variety of ‘products’ ranging from laser cut ready design, to books and music. The group of designers behind the shop, KithKin, are primarily from a design background, but the shop is not limited by genre or discipline.
The initial thoughts that led to the development of SomeRightsReserved arouse from a desire from several of the designers to make and sell their designs and creations. In design this traditionally means a protracted period of time of development, testing, protecting your idea, and then getting made, then trying to sell it. Oh and finding the money to do so.
Now we can conceive an idea, refine it in a day and publish it the next. We publish almost anything in a digital format, whether it be rapid prototype files, which can be used to produce physical objects, to subversive pieces of viral software.
We let designers and creatives publish their products on their terms, exhibiting and touring their work offline and online.
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CC Talks With: MusicBrainz
We recently had the pleasure of catching up with Robert Kaye, “lead geek” at MusicBrainz, a community music database that “attempts to create a comprehensive music information site.” Kaye fills us in on what is happening at MusicBrainz, including extensive background on the project, how they use CC licenses, and their goal to add broader support for classical music.
Where does MusicBrainz fit in the open content ecology?
MusicBrainz plays an important role in blazing the path for open databases. We know how to play with open source and music, and we have few examples of how to work
with open structured data. We work hard to make our data useful and available to people, as we believe that Metcalfe’s law also applies to data. Thus, getting lots of people to use our data makes MusicBrainz vastly more useful and valuable. With that in mind, we want to be the de-facto standard for music metadata in the open content ecology.
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CC Talks With: Severed Fifth
Written, performed, recorded and produced entirely by Jono Bacon, the album touches a range of political and social topics, driven by a brutal, thundering style with pounding double bass drumming, grinding guitars and guttural vocals. The album was recorded in Jono’s home studio in central England and combines a range of styles. Pre-release listening sessions have resulted in comparisons to Metallica, Cannibal Corpse, Slayer, Pantera, Decapitated and Hatebreed.
Jono Bacon, the one man band behind Severed Fifth, released the inaugural album Denied by Reign today. This metal album is trying to bring the idea of Free Culture licensing to the world of metal music. We previously discussed here the announcement of the idea back in June of this year. It is a testament to Jono’s enthusiasm for this project how quickly he was able to write, record, and master this first album while also doing his full time job as Community Manager for Ubuntu.
1 Comment »CC Talks With: Colin Mutchler
Colin Mutchler is one of the original CC success stories. Back in 2003, he posted his song, My Life, to Opsound under a CC BY-SA license. A month later a violinist name Nora Beth added a violin track, calling the new work My Life Changed. It was one of the first instances of CC facilitating unsolicited collaboration, laying the ground work for the amazing remix culture we have seen develop over the past 5 years. Mutchler has since expanded his resume, working on photography and media production as well as his music. We caught up with him recently to find more about what he has been up to since we last checked in – needless to say, it has been a while.
Colin at work… circa 2008 | activefree CC BY
Can you give us some background on yourself and your music? How did you get started as a musician? What are your major influences?
My first 7 years in Bellingham WA were filled with my parents’ sounds from the Grateful Dead and George Winston. But it wasn’t until I first started playing guitar in college that I began to write lyrics, initially inspired by people like Ben Harper, Ani Difranco, and Bob Dylan. Silvio Rodriguez was also an influence ever since I lived in Bolivia in 1998. Then when I saw Saul Williams in the movie Slam in 1999, it became clear that the most powerful voices of our generation would come through Hip Hop and spoken word. Other influential voices for me were Sarah Jones and Alix Olson. For a while I imagined myself becoming a kind of folk-hop version Mos Def and Talib Kweli (still do), but with a full time job in digital marketing and a vision for a crowdfunding media tool for social entrepreneurs, I’m still fighting that daily choice to actually be an artist and musician.
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