This week’s featured content is Loca Records. This is an “open source” record label that features a variety of electronic music artists, with many of their songs available under a Creative Commons license. Their mission is to change the way record companies do business and follow the GNU/Linux model of releasing work and receiving compensation.

Sounds good in Spanish, too. Here’s an article from Clarin.com on Creative Commons and director James Boyle‘s recent visit to Argentina. The piece doesn’t quite get how Creative Commons’s approach is reliant upon and compatible with copyright, but it’s nice to see another example of interest in our work building across the world.

Earlier today, Steven Garrity’s excellent essay on Mozilla branding was Slashdotted, bringing his server down for several hours (it’s a common effect).

What is interesting about it is that I personally could not reach the server to read the document, but thanks to the attached Creative Commons license and the license provisions that allow for redistribution, I could find and read the document on one of the mirrors that sprang up, and it was completely legal. In the past, setting up mirrors of Slashdotted articles has been done as a courtesy to other Slashdot readers, but it’s always been of dubious legal standing.

In addition to the legal grey area, sudden spikes of bandwidth often carry high hosting bills for their creators. Of course, you can never know what will strike the fancy of the web community, but Creative Commons licenses do also allow you to host your larger media files at the Internet Archive’s audio and movie areas, free of charge.

On October 6 we posted a list of technology challenges that we hoped would inspire developers.

It did inspire one: Nathan Yergler has already created and made a few rounds of improvements to a web app that validates and extracts license metadata, just as called for.

As an example of what Nathan’s application can do, see what it says about the metadata in the web page about our new Copy Me/Remix Me compact disc. Hint — the metadata serves to verify license claims embedded in MP3s of the songs on the disc, per our MP3 license embedding strategy.

This week’s featured content is Douglas Rushkoff‘s new essay entitled Open Source Democracy. It’s a 70 page essay (available as a free downloadable PDF) that explores the future of politics in an interactive world. It was created for the UK thinktank Demos, and is available under a Creative Commons License.

For those unfamiliar with Rushkoff’s work, he’s a media analyst, author of numerous books on the subject, and creator of the groundbreaking Frontline special “Merchants of Cool.”

Earlier tonight at the Lessig vs. Rosen debate, we gave away copies of our second* CD, Copy Me/Remix Me. It features a variety of music from an even wider variety of artists. Among the featured musicians, you’ll find record-at-home independents, magnatune and opsound artists, world music groups, and small town rock bands.

As we mentioned on this blog before, we had a little mini-contest to get remixes for the disc and we’ve posted all of the entries received.
A remix from Flowerlounge and fourstones.net ended up on the final CD, but picking the top two was a tough task. Victor at fourstones.net turned in eight very different mixes that ran the gamut. Albert Lash not only remixed and rearranged the original Superego song, he also tossed in numerous samples from Oyez, the audio archive of Supreme Court arguments. Evan Lawrence’s mix was a nice reinterpretation of the song and DBF’s inventive and humorous mix featured a synthesized voice of a woman leaving an answering machine for an IBM typewriter, which was also a staff favorite.

Feel free to download, share, and remix the songs and if you catch us at a conference or event later this year, we’ll probably have copies of the CD on hand to give away.

*Our first compilation CD was done in February of 2003, for the Noisepop festival in San Francisco.

If you’re in Los Angeles, you might want to check out Chairman of the Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig, along with former recording industry head Hilary Rosen tonight and tomorrow at USC’s Bovard Auditorium. Tickets are $10, and Creative Commons will be there giving out information and licensed music CDs (more about the CDs shortly).

Gnomoradio is a new project to create a free software package that will allow people to share Creative Commons licensed audio. While there are no downloadable clients currently, the project is proceeding rapidly and they have put a call out for musicians wanting to release their licensed music to the network.

Streaming Media’s recent article “Creative Commons Licensing for Digital Media” is a detailed review and demonstration of our metadata embedding guidelines. Larry Bouthillier covers why the licenses exist, the license terms themselves, and how to apply them to web pages and music formats.

Inspired by world-famous musician and composer Gilberto Gil and developed with the help of the veteran found-art group Negativland, Creative Commons will launch our new Sampling Licenses on December 16, 2003. Read more.