Commons News
Autobiography under Creative Commons license
Bob Myers sez: “I’ve put my new book, Bobby and the A-Bomb Factory, up on the web under a Creative Commons License. It’s ‘historical autobiography,’ a romp through the 1950s with me as a child and my atom-bomb-scientist dad. Please take a look!
(Via Mark at Boing Boing.)
No Comments »California Lawyers For the Arts
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel at the California Laywers for the Arts, Music Business Seminar. It was a great event — we discussed how the Internet is affecting commercial music distribution, and business models. In the context of the file-sharing debate, I spoke about how Creative Commons can clarify whether artists want their works to be shared. I also put forth our vision of creating a market where people can sell sampling friendly content, as is demonstrated on the WIRED CD. Imagine if the next U2 album included sampling rights, and you could interact with your music to create something new — that would be amazing.
No Comments »Billboard Awards
As you know, the WIRED CD was recently nominated for a Billboard Digital Entertainment Award in the category of “best use of technology by a music label.” Neeru and I joined our WIRED counterparts this weekend in Los Angeles to attend the awards ceremony, where we learned that the CD did not take home the award.
It was an honor to be a finalist, and we salute the winner, LL Nation by Island Def Jam.
No Comments »The WIRED CD: The Calcutta Telegraph
A very nice article on the WIRED CD by Subhajit Banerjee in The Telegraph of Culcutta, India.
Can new-age music piracy be curbed by a good old fashioned crackdown? There are stirrings that suggest the way music is shared is about to undergo a drastic change, thanks to the open approach.No Comments »
The WIRED CD: “Going Legit”
Reuters has a piece today about BitTorrent in which the WIRED CD is mentioned as one example among many of perfectly legal uses of the technology.
No Comments »Killer CC App: The Publisher, beta version
Leveraging the Internet Archive’s
generous offer to host Creative Commons licensed (audio and video)
files for free, we recently completed the 0.96 beta version of The Publisher,
a desktop, drag-and-drop application that licenses audio and video
files, and sends them to the Internet Archive for free hosting.
When you’re done uploading, the application gives you a URL where others can download the file. It also is able to tag MP3 files with Creative Commons metadata and publish verification metadata to the Web. A HUGE congratulations to Nathan Yergler, who’s done an amazing job with this. Also, a great thanks to Jon Aizen and the folk at the Internet Archive. You can download the Publisher from here — give it a test run and let us know what you think.
Also note that aside from being downloadable from Internet Archive,
these tagged MP3s can flow on to P2P networks, and be identified as
Creative Commons licensed (see our Lookup app we recently also updated to 0.96). Morpheus is currently the only file sharing application to identify Creative Commons licensed files.
Here are some screenshots of how it works:
Drag and drop your file.
Choose a Creative Commons license.
Upload your file to the Internet Archive.
Get a URL from where you can download your file.
Visit the web page where your work will be published, after it
goes through the Archive’s curatorial process (ususally within 24 hours.
The WIRED CD: Featured on Endgadget
Here’s a nice how-to piece from Endgadget that uses the WIRED CD as the guinea pig.
No Comments »The WIRED CD: NPR recording is up
You can now listen online to NPR’s conversation about the WIRED CD with Wired’s Chris Anderson and Le Tigre’s Kathleen Hanna.
No Comments »DJ Heaven: The Remix Hotel
This weekend in San Francisco: The Remix Hotel, a three-day “immersion in technology” and music featuring Dan the Automator (of the WIRED CD!) and hometown phenom Kid 606.
I’m curious to see what some of these guests could do with the WIRED CD and will try to find out for myself.
No Comments »The WIRED CD: What the Artists Think
One of the many cool aspects of the November issue of WIRED are the blurbs about each artist who contributed to the CD. In the print mag, they dot the many-page Creative Commons spread like Easter eggs. Example:
Track 7: Dan the Automator/Relaxation Spa Treatment
The busy brain behind groups like Deltron 3030, Dr. Octagon, and
No Comments »
Lovage, Dan Nakamura has made a career out of mashing the styles and
sounds of an eclectic array of partners. “The music is always greater
than just the sum of the contributors’ parts,” he says. Thus a concept
album featuring Brit-pop icon Damon Albarn, underground rapper Del the
Funkee Homosapien, and experimental turntablist Kid Koala could have
easily been a schizophrenic mess, but as produced by Nakamura, the
Gorillaz was a slick and smart style hybrid that became an
international smash. “I make collages,” he says. “I’m not the kind of
guy who samples big, obvious loops from hit songs. I’m more interested
in finding lots of random little tones from all over and then creating
a totally new track out of the pieces.”
