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Garageband adds Creative Commons

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Wired has a short write-up of the GarageBand (the website for musicians, not the Apple software) annoucement to include a Creative Commons license during song uploads. If you’ve never tried out GarageBand, sign up and give it a whirl. Listeners rate song samples as one vs. another, and you can view the top rated songs…

Harry Potter and Wizard People

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The NY Times has an interesting story of a new movie project called Wizard People, Dear Reader. It’s a derivative work where the first Harry Potter movie plays while artist Brad Neely creates his own soundtrack to the film. It falls into a gray area of law and Warner Brothers declined to comment on it.…

Brazil Re-cap

Copyright

A few more words about the iCommons Brazil launch. It is hard to do the event justice. It was completely overwhelming, a true celebration, and we’ve only now recovered from the whole thing and regrouped. As you know, iCommons Brazil made its debut at the 5th Annual Software Livre conference in Porto Alegre. An afternoon…

Copyright and the death of Public Enemy's sound

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Stay Free Magazine has a great interview with Chuck D and Hank Shocklee from Public Enemy. In it, they discuss how lax copyright laws of the late 1980s allowed them to produce thickly sampled songs for their first two major label releases. “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” and “Fear of…

Recombo Brazil

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In about an hour the official launch celebration of Creative Commons Brazil will begin. Neeru and I are here at the 5th Annual Software Livre conference in Porto Alegre with the iCommons Brazil team from Rio’s FGV Law School, as well as William Fisher, faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center. Our chairman, Lawrence…

Panorama Ephemera

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This week’s featured content is Rick Prelinger‘s new film Panorama Ephemera, produced entirely with short government clips from the 1940s-1970s. For those in the Bay Area, it will be shown at the San Francisco Cinematheque on Sunday, June 13 at 7:30 pm. The clips range from the everyday normal to the absolutely bizarre and together…