LET the music play — and be shared!

Press Robot, November 30th, 2004

In all, Wired is giving away 750,000 copies of a CD with a difference:
all the songs are included under a Creative Commons license which means
From La Vanguardia

CREATIVE Commons Search Engine Integrated into Firefox 1.0

Press Robot, November 30th, 2004

Creative Commons today unveiled an updated beta version of its search engine,
which scours the web for text, images, audio, and video free to re-use
From Search Engine Journal

ADAPTIVE Path Helps Move Copyright Permissions Into the 21st …

Press Robot, November 30th, 2004

18, 2004–With the launch of the new Creative Commons Web site, Adaptive
Path is proud to have played a key role in what the San Jose Mercury News

from Business Wire

MUSIC lovers invited to mash

Press Robot, November 30th, 2004

… under a new type of license. Called the Creative Commons, it is the
from Seattle Times

W3C10

Mike Linksvayer, November 29th, 2004

Our World Wide Web Consortium representative Ben Adida will be present at meetings concurrent with the consortium’s tenth anniversary celebration.

Ben has been doing important work to standardize embedding RDF metadata in HTML (I find the RDF/A proposal particularly compelling).

Services like the Creative Commons search engine build on RDF metadata describing licensed works that you get automatically when you choose a license. The W3C’s RDF-in-HTML standardization efforts promise to increase the value of CC metadata, opening paths to integration with many new applications.

La creation en partage

Roland, November 29th, 2004

CC French project lead Melanie Dulong de Rosnay and Daniele Bourcier
have just published ‘International Commons at the Digital Age - la creation en partage‘, a book with
some valuable chapters on our first experiences with the internationalized CC licenses.

The book was written as a contribution to a day-long event in Paris on
November 19th to celebrate the launch of the French CC licenses.

For this occasion (photographs and some abstracts to follow in these
pages) Melanie had organized several panels at the French National
Assembly debating the merits of the CC approach from a variety of
different perspectives (academia, the publishing industry, politics,
science, the arts). The celebration continued into the wee hours at the
Maison de Metallo in downtown Paris with live music acts, poetry
readings, website presentations and fair trade drinks.

Many thanks to Melanie for all her enthusiasm and her splendid
organization of this event.

The WIRED CD: La Vanguardia

Glenn Otis Brown, November 29th, 2004

La Vanguardia, the most popular newspaper in Catalonia, ran a story on the WIRED CD this weekend.

We Don’t Need No Exploitation

Glenn Otis Brown, November 26th, 2004

A group of former pupils at a London comprehensive school are poised to win thousands of pounds in unpaid royalties for singing on Pink Floyd’s classic Another Brick In The Wall 25 years ago.

This is a great story.

I’m looking forward to the guy who screams “How can yew have any pudding if you haven’t eaten yer meat?” bringing the next lawsuit. (If for no other reason, I bet he’s a really interesting-looking bloke 25 years later.)

INQUIRER does Magnatune

Mike Linksvayer, November 25th, 2004

Snarky tech news site the INQUIRER interviews Magnatune’s John Buckman, who is refreshingly direct.

Buckman: We sell a little over 1000 albums a month - about $10,000 a month - and this has been stable for about 6 months. Music Licensing has grown from about $2,000 a month 6 months ago to about $10,000 a month now. I expect most future growth to come through sales through other channels, as well as music licensing.

For more check out the interview and John’s blog, including his recent take on the online music space.

All Magnatune releases (from 174 artists!) are under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

Tune in.

Big Sonic Sharing

Mike Linksvayer, November 25th, 2004

Pittsburgh based label Big Sonic Recordings has released its catalog under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license.

At Big Sonic Recordings, you’ll notice that all of our artists give away all of their music for free, and every artist has an online store full of merchandise that you can purchase if you wish to support them. It is the Big Sonic pledge to keep the music free, and find alternative ways for artists to be compensated for their work in this new digital age.

Big Sonic claims to be “home of the sick and twisted” but I’d say they’re alright. The kids might enjoy the brand spanking new album from Liquid Crutch.

Q: Aren’t you guys hurting yourselves in the long run?


A: With what? We have a disclaimer stating that if you want to use our music for, say, a soundtrack, just contact us for permission. We make music to make music and go completely ape shit on stage. If it were money we wanted, we would have gotten different jobs.

Rock on!