Fading Ways Music, an indie record label based out of Toronto, announced their 2004 releases will be sold under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike licenses. Fading Ways Music is the first internationally-distributed label to adopt Creative Commons licensing for its new physical CD releases. Fading Ways articulates its philosophy for open-licenses nicely on its mission page. Neil Leyton, the label’s manager, makes a great quote here: “Music Publishing as a concept is wrong. No one creates songs out of thin air.”

Fading Ways joins other labels, such as Opsound, Magnatune, and Loca Records that embrace Creative Commons licenses, enabling fans to rip, mix, and burn their favorite tunes without legal doubt.

Cory Doctorow, author of the acclaimed sci-fi book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, has a new novel out in stores called Eastern Standard Tribe. Like Down and Out, it is both available for purchase as well as for free download, under a Creative Commons license.

Creative Commons will be an exhibitor at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego next week.

Etech is regarded by many as the best tech conference of the year, always in step with the latest creations and aspirations of the alpha geeks, having evolved from the Peer-to-Peer Conference in early 2001 and P2P & Web Services in late 2001 to the current multi-tracked annual conference starting two years ago. (Incidentally, the Creative Commons concept was introduced at ETCon 2002. How time flies.)

Matt Haughey and Mike Linksvayer will be attending. Stop by the Creative Commons booth, or better yet our participant session (time and location yet to be announced). We’ll be introducing a new CC metadata-enhanced application. Hint: it’s described in one of our tech challenges, heretofore unmet.

If you’re in the area but not an attendee, you can still register for a free exhibits pass, or an exhibits plus keynotes and birds-of-a-feather (participant sessions) pass for only $50. Hope to see you there!

Victor Stone writes a remixer-readable description on how the new Creative Commons Sampling license compares to our standard licenses. He also mentions that it’s important to have format specific metdata, so that search engines can find Creative Commons licensed audio, as opposed to text, images, or video. This way remixers can easily find sounds they can remix legally, rather than having to wade through a mass of content.

You get format specific metadata when you choose a license and designate what format your content is in. We’ll soon launch a seach engine that reads this metadata so that you can find works to use as part of your own creations. Unfortunately, currently no major search engine offers this service.

iRATE Radio, an open-source application that sends users free-legal MP3s through its radio client, is now able to read the ID3 tags of MP3 files to identify Creative Commons license information. Enabling this kind of feature is exactly why Creative Commons put forth its MP3 embedding strategy many months ago, which defines a standard way to embed Creative Commons metadata in the ID3 tag of an MP3. Our hope was that file-sharing networks, and applications like iRATE, would read the ID3 tags, and tell users if there was a Creative Commons license attached. This way, users could feel assured to trade these MP3s online, or even make remixes of them. Check out some screenshots of the CC enabled iRATE Radio application.

iRATE has yet to enable the second part of our MP3 strategy, where MP3s are validated through an automatic web page verification process. (Validation can be done manually, though). This step is important because it prevents people from making fraudulent license claims about the MP3s.

Beyond being able to read ID3 tags, iRATE Radio has a catalogue of over 46,000 MP3s it can send you. It’s also really smart in that it enables users to rate songs and then sends you more songs based on your ratings and preferences. We hope that more applications follow the lead of iRATE!

Linux Journal has a great interview with John Buckman from Magnatune, the non-evil record label that sells Creative Commons licensed music on a sliding scale. It’s turning out to be lucrative for the artists involved, with the average musician taking in $1,500 in royaltes last year and the top artists making over $6,000 in royalties (which are 50% of sales).

While six thousand dollars won’t buy you a Bentley or a mansion for MTV Cribs, most artists listed at Magnatune are independent musicians that record at home. Considering that for most Magnatune artists, it means sending a few high quality recordings to a server and later getting thousands of dollars in royalties, it’s a pretty good system for the struggling musician. Combined with the services of something like Pump Audio, today’s independent artist has a lot of avenues to make money off their music while still letting others share it freely online.

So nice to see our tagline continue to catch on. There’s a nice profile of Creative Commons in the InfoTech section of the Singaporean news outlet Today. It’s entitled “Some Rights Reserved.”

This week’s featured content is Electrobel, a massive music community site for Belgian electronic music of all genres. There are over 2000 Creative Commons licensed tracks available for streaming and downloading. The site has an impressive array of features as well. Check out music by genre, by artist, or by song (the little diskette icon will let you download a song) and you can even leave comments for the artist on the songs you like. It’s a great way for DJs to share songs with each other and get comments and also a great way to hear new music for users. I keep coming back to the hip-hop section, fascinated by rhymes fast and hard in a language I can’t speak.

There’s a nice piece in the NYTimes about the increased levels of public participation in recent Mars landings. A big part of the reason is that given a large, interested population with broadband connections, NASA officials have done their best to share every bit of data, image, and video they can online, and as a result thousands of websites have cropped up including those by laymen colorizing images and even weblogs written from the rover’s point of view.

Thanks to NASA sharing every bit of information they can online, the experience of watching the Mars landing and exploration for students and observers today is a far cry from the days of the moon landing. Instead of a one-way communication delivered by grainy video on television, we have an interactive, two-way process where the viewer can help scientists on the other side of the globe and take in information along with millions of others, sharing their own interpretations online.

An interesting contest has just opened for entries, called Fusedspace. “An international design competition on innovative applications for new technology in the public domain” is how they describe themselves but keep in mind the term “public domain” in this case is more specific to public spaces. The contest is set to give away over 17 thousand Euros in prize money for the best proposals that meld public spaces, technology, art, and community. Entry deadline is April 30th.