“Time was when the art of arrangement” — the creative reinterpretation of songs — “occupied an honored place in musical composition.” “Bach, Mozart, Liszt and Ravel,” writes Liszt biographer Alan Walker in the New York Times, “were among the many composers who lavished their talents on this important activity, fitting out their own works or…

Creative Commons will sponsor acclaimed singer-songwriter Cat Power (a.k.a. Chan Marshall) at the San Francisco NoisePop music festival this Wednesday, Feb. 26. Advanced tickets are sold out, but some tickets may still be available at the door (Bimbo’s 365) the night of the show. Creative Commons staffers will be in the lobby handing out copies…

Brandon Wiley, an early developer of Freenet, unveiled his newest work at CodeCon. Using various cutting-edge peer-to-peer technologies, he’s developed a shared radio streaming system, dubbed Alluvium, that allows listeners to share their connections with others as they tune in. In a Register write-up today, Wiley mentions that the project may include spidering the web…

Mike Meyers, star of the popular Austin Powers series, has just scored an unusual movie deal with Dreamworks that will allow him to make films from sampling earlier movies. DreamWorks will acquire the necessary rights so the actor can be digitally inserted in the old flicks. Today, people practicing in music and movie “mash-ups” are…

Free trading of our music has genuine, verifiable returns. Community. Exchanges of artistic thought and aesthetic commodity. . . The RIAA argument that artists won’t particpate in the marketplace of ideas without financial compensation for CDs seems pretty short-sighted from where we sit. — Chris Wetherell, Dealership We recently sat down for an interview with…

Creative Commons licenses are designed so that creators can share their works with others easily. You might ask “What can I create if I am not an artist, writer, or musican?” but there many options when it comes to personal publishing online. The first such example is a weblog. Many weblog authors have applied licenses…

“A Kafkaesque state of affairs has effectively closed off access to thousands of old movies, books and pieces of music because the copyright owners can’t be located.” From a nice article about Creative Commons and content licensing by Sarah Lai Stirland in the Seattle Times.

One more from today’s cosmic copyright coincidence file: “Some of These Bootleggers, They Make Pretty Good Stuff” — a Salon piece on Bob Dylan and “the hidden industry he (unwittingly) helped create.” Thought-provoking.

An interesting piece in the New York Times today discusses “Illegal Art: Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age,” an exhibition dedicated to works built in part from other copyrighted works — without permission. By sign-of-the-times coincidence, I participated in a panel yesterday entitled “The Illegal Imagination,” at the Future of Music Coalition’s superb summit…

San Francisco, CA — Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting the creative reuse of intellectual works, launched its first product today: its machine-readable copyright licenses, available free of charge from creativecommons.org. The licenses allow copyright holders to easily inform others that their works are free for copying and other uses under specific conditions. These…