Freesound is a collaborative database of nearly 120,000 sounds. We first posted about the project in 2005. Freesound specializes in sounds, not songs, and those sounds have been used thousands of times from ccMixter remixes to a major motion picture. The project has just launched a complete rewrite of its site, with a new, modern…

Copyright Criminals is a new documentary on the rise of sampling, specifically in hip-hop music, and the cultural and legal effects it has caused. From the Copyright Criminals website: Copyright Criminals examines the creative and commercial value of musical sampling, including the related debates over artistic expression, copyright law, and (of course) money. This documentary…

Yoko Ono wants you to remix her track “The Sun Is Down!” whose stems are released under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial license. You can download the sample pack which includes the track’s vocal effects, loops of bass, drums, sound effects, and Tenorion files. But Yoko’s also running a contest to find the 10 best remixes. Here…

Kraftwerk by greenplastic875 | CC BY German electronic-music pioneers Kraftwerk were told yesterday by a judge in Germany that a two-second sample used by a producer in Germany did not infringe on their copyright. From the BBC (emphasis added): The ruling overturns an earlier decision against Moses Pelham’s use of a short sample from Metal…

Today we are retiring two of the Creative Commons licenses — the stand alone Developing Nations license, as well as one of the three Sampling licenses we offer. The reasons for these retirements are both practical and principled. The practical reason is simple lack of interest: From the start, Creative Commons has promised to keep…

Freesound is a repository of CC-licensed samples … around 20,000 samples, recently integrated with ccMixter via the Sample Pool API. We recently spoke to Bram de Jong, Freesound founder and researcher at the Music Technology Group of Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Creative Commons (“CC”): How did Freesound come about? Bram de Jong, Freesound Founder…