This is interesting news for musicians — you know how some songs are really catchy and you wonder if the hooks could be engineered to make people like the song? A company called Polyphonic HMI has created software they call “Hit Song Science” which is supposed to contain algorithms that determine if a song is…

I’m at the Institute for the Future today for the Future of Cooperation Expert Colloqium. (I’m in favor of the future, and cooperation, as it happens, so it’s a good fit.) One of the many interesting things I’ve learned about today is “visual journalism,” which you could also call “whiteboarding for posterity.” Eileen Clegg, who…

John Buckman, creator and head of the non-evil, Creative Commons friendly music label Magnatune has started his own blog. A recent gem is the exchange his wife had with a music executive at an industry conference. Great stuff.

At the tail end of last night’s broadcast of ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, they did a short piece on music mash-ups (video only available to ABCnews premium subscribers). There’s an interview with Mitch Butler and he does a live mash-up demo of Eminem’s Without Me laid over Scott Joplin’s ragtime piano classics.…

Ben Adida, one of our technical advisors, will be talking about Creative Commons at the DSpace User Meeting on Thursday morning at MIT. He will demonstrate the integration of the CC license selection process into the DSpace application. Thanks to the CC License Engine, this development work can be done in a few hours, providing…

Buzznet is a photoblog community offering free hosting space for your digital photos and mobile phone shots. They offer image uploads via your web browser and cameraphones using email, making it easy to setup your own gallery of photos. Recently we noticed they became the first photoblogging service to offer the ability to license your…

Questions of the day: Hip-hop artists and DJs have long made a practice of inviting remixes by releasing acapella or instrumental tracks. What stops them from formalizing that invitation with, say, a CC license? Is it that the music-biz lawyers want to reserve the right to hold remixers hostage, in the event they start to…

Just a quick note to say I just downloaded your MP3 from the harvard.edu site. It’s good to know that my music was good enough to be included in your report. I enjoy fact that other people can appreciate it and use it freely in their own work. Regards, Laurie Laptop My friend Benjamen Walker…

This week’s featured content is the ebook Just In Tokyo. It’s a offbeat guidebook to Tokyo written by web veteran Justin Hall and is now available for download under a Creative Commons license. First printed a few years go, it’s now out of print and Justin is asking for voluntary donations if you like the…

Creative Commons’ Assistant Director, Neeru Paharia will be on a panel titled Music in the Digital Era this Thursday at the UC Davis School of Law. The panel, cosponsored by the Entertainment and Sports Law Society and California Lawyers for the Arts, will focus on the effects of digital mediums and internet downloading on the…