Came across this awesome business that’s been building up traction in Japan called C-shirt — powered by media-wiki company Nota that leverages Creative Commons licensing in a pretty unconventional way. At first glance, it might seem like one of the innumerable t-shirt vendor sites out there — but it is, in fact, way, way cooler.

First, the conventional idea: users submit t-shirt designs which can be viewed online and ordered for printing. However, the twist is that since all the designs are placed under CC, Nota provides an interface with which to edit and reproduce these designs accordingly. Once you’ve remixed it to your liking, C-shirt will print and ship your unique version right to your door. Depending on the license, you can even repost your new design to the site.

Even better, the service is outfitted to work with some enabled mobile devices, so if you see a shirt you like on the street, you can scan the Quick Response (QR) code included on each design with your phone, which will capture a unique address where you can load and edit the t-shirt before getting it yourself.

Very slick. It’s mostly been active in Japan, but I’m hoping they start to make the crossover into the States. Thinking it’d be easy to expand this into a whole range of products — hats, lunchboxes, computers…