As a tie-in to Spider-Man 2, Spite Your Face created a short movie of Spidey battling Doc Ock, done entirely with Legos. It’s a cracking good little romp, and it made me think of some of the other great Lego remixes I’ve seen, such as 2001: A Lego Odyssey and Monty Python Lego. Legos have…

Annalee Newitz has a great article in Alternet about Mash-ups, going over the copyright laws involved and how the laws are viewed in the mash-up scene. It’s an interested clash, where restrictive laws loom over digital musicians armed with low-cost computers and software that makes mixing easy. In this realm, Newitz sees mash-ups as a…

J. LeRoy noticed two hours of audio arguments from Loving v. Virginia (a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case that overturned an anti-interracial marriage law in Virginia) at Oyez, available under a CC license. A couple days ago LeRoy released a remix of the arguments. The real-life contemporary remixreplay of the same arguments is readily apparent.

Ronaldo Lemos, project lead extraordinaire of Creative Commons Brazil, reports: Mombojó is one of the most interesting new bands in Brazil. They mix traditional Brazilian music like samba and bossa nova with electronic beats and rock. Their album, “Nadadenovo” (meaning: “nothing new”), is available online at www.mombojo.com.br. Even if they say there is “nothing new”…

Wired has a bizarre story of music and sampling royalties involving found sound recordings by one person sold as CDs which the band Wilco sampled from. What is unusual about the case is the company claiming copyright on the sounds, Irdial Discs, didn’t perform or write the shortwave broadcasts of what is reportedly hours of…

Though the graphics on this project probably reveal the author’s personal positions on the President, it is pretty cool that someone went to the trouble of creating an audio archive of every speech President George W Bush has made publicly. They’re available for download as mp3, or you can get all 10 Gb of audio…

FAIRCOPY has developed an innovative way for musicians to distribute their content over P2P networks and get paid. They’ve also built in a way for fans to leverage the power of P2P to resdistribute their favorite FAIRCOPY artists, and make a commission. Musicians can also offer free samples of their work under Creative Commons licenses.

Several months ago, Apple released the music software Garageband, allowing anyone with a mac to make some music. Soon after the release, community websites sprang up to allow Garageband users to share music with each other, and build songs together. This is a perfect use for Creative Commons licenses, and earlier we noted that the…

The writings of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg may be amongst the most important in the 20th Century but it’s the sound of Burroughs’ growl and the haunting lilt in Ginsberg’s recitals that have compelled turntablists to use samples of their speaking voices. Sampling pioneers and Ninjatune entrepreneurs Jonathan More and Matt Black (a.k.a.…

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…