The legal plug:

It seems Doug “Bush Free Zone” Bradley used a CC Mixter fourstones track in his latest video blog entries about raccoons. All of a sudden I love Georgia.

The boot plug:

Mutant Pop’s Radio Clash show just featured the fourstones “Mort Sahl vs. Toots Maytal” mash-up.

What’s crazy/funny about these two particular tracks is that my guitar playing in “Funky Dunky” as used by Doug is a complete and total rip-off of the guitar playing in “Funky Kingston” as used in the Toots mash-up.

So how is copyright protecting that “creation”? That “IP”? I listened to the record (er, a lot) and did everything I could to make my playing sound like that record. I totally built “Funky Dunky” on top of previous works like “Kingston” and we all accept that in order for me to create something “new” it’s ok for me to steal from Toots. (…and don’t tell me Toots wasn’t listening and stealing just as much from Otis Redding… and on and on…) For doing this I’m a disciplined musician.

I also created something new in the Mort Sahl mash-up. Of course for that I’m a federal criminal.

And please don’t tell me there’s something different going on. The creative process I used in both cases was exactly the same. I stole from the original to create something new. So the technology changed, so what. If I would have had a sampler in 1979 I would have used it. As it is all I had was a record player, guitar and amp. And really, really bad acne.

Puh-leeze.

[UPDATE:] Matt says: wtf???

Professor Lessig says: (sigh)

Repeat after me: giving your music away is good for your career.

As reported by Neeru on the the Creative Commons weblog, after a few months of giving his music away on CC Mixter, Minus Kelvin was discovered and he and new label-mate (yes, another Mixter) Pat Chilla the Beat Gorrilla have been signed to a production deal that covers the next three season of “America’s Top Model” — which of course means I’m torn between wishing the producers of that show great harm and ongoing success. The deal also covers a whole lot more pre-production and pilot work but I’ve been sworn to secrecy. Let’s just say I’ll be hitting these guys up for more than a loosey.

On a much smaller scale I can tell you that I’m taking time off from my CC Mixter duties to work on my next Magnatune album. The reason I bring this up is that I also met my collaborator for this album on Mixter. Weird Polymer rides the LA Metro to work every day from the deep Valley to downtown and composes many nice modern classical pieces on the train. Our album (tentatively called “fourstones plays Weird Polymer”) will be aimed at film/tv production. Or grants. Or commissions. Or Grammies. You know, whatever.

The “Creative Commons Magnatune Lisa Debenedictis Remix Contest” is fully under way at Mixter.

The 10 winning tracks (up to two winners allowed per contestant) are going to be released as a remix compilation on Magnatune so ever winner will get signed as an official artist and get royalties. It’ s probably not going to be a WHOLE lot of money because John’s still taking 50% off the top and everybody sampled on the album will get their license royalty. A total guesstimate on my part says if you have two remixes on the album you’ll probably end up seeing around $1.50 per $10 sale/license. (I could be off by about $1.50 give or take so don’t go by what I say.)

People who actually read the rules to these things (it takes all kinds I guess) can find them here.

Chalk this one up to “hey we’re all still learning about this stuff”: because the Sampling licenses specifically forbid using derived works for advertising and because Magnatune makes fully half of it’s money through licensing to film/tv productions of all kinds the (tough) decision was made to exclude all material on CC Mixter from the available sample pool for the contest. This one is fixable in the long term but the contest had to get off the ground in the short term so there it is.

To mitigate some of that nonesense it’s worth noting that entire Magnatune catalog is available for sampling (>1700 tracks of music) as high quality MP3s and to make things easier I’ve cut over 400 ACIDized loops and labeled them all by artist-bpm. A couple of the artists also made their studio tracks available and we’ve posted those as uncompressed WAVs.

We also spent a fair amount of energy putting ALL the samples onto one page to make it easy to browse, preview and download the whole thing. All that can be found here:

http://ccmixter.org/contests/magnatune/loops

Penguin Books (UK) is having a remix contest of sorts. “Penguin will publish the winning submissions in a digital audio book with proceeds being donated to charity.”

The samples are spoken word recitals of classics and other stuff I’ve never heard of. “Moby Dick”, “Great Gatsby”, Oscar Wilde, Jack Kerouac (ready by David Carradine) and over 20 others. These are clean, dry recordings, kind of perfect really.

For the life of me I can’t find any license agreement about the samples. Maybe these are Public Domain. That would be too much to ask for.