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Creative Commons Remix Contest

Posted by michael on from the free-and-clear dept.

victors writes "Creative Commons and WIRED recently went public beta with CC Mixter which is a Commons pool for music samples and remixes. The site creates a tree of remix/sources inline with every entry and has Flikr/del.ciou.us style tagging. The launch includes two remix contests and features samples and cuts put in the Commons by Chuck D., Beastie Boys, David Byrne, Danger Mouse and tons more. The winners end up on Chuck D.'s next CD and a CC promo disk and there's already been some pretty astounding entries. Of course every upload is under a CC license that allows legal sampling including contest entries and the big name source tracks and samples. I took over the coding for the site from Lucas Gonze (of WebJay) who did a proof of concept. We're currently working on making the site source part of the CC Tools open source project. That version will support remixing of any media including images, videos and Flash mods."

1 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Where is the talent here? by ZZabinski · · Score: 3, Interesting

    From Chuck D's perspective, I don't think that this has a much to do with remixing as sampling in general. Now, there is an artistic aspect to remixing itself. For example, see what DJ Danger Mouse did with Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatle's White Album before it was shut down.

    But either way, a large part of Chuck D's success with Public Enemy was the music produced by the Bomb Squad on their It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Fear of a Black Planet albums. On those albums, the Bomb Squad sampled tons of music to produce those tracks. This site has a list of many of them. And in fact, sampling existing music has been part of rap since the beginning with DJs mixing tracks. Such production, though, is not viable today due to the crackdown on such practices without paying royalties, and actually paying royalties would have enormous cost. This issue actually came up in the testimony Chuck gave before Congress regarding file-sharing (where opposing testimony was given LL Cool J).

    With Creative Commons, artists would be able to sample existing music for their own tracks and be able to sell them, while still respecting the copyrights of the original artist and avoiding the financial burdens that royalties impose.

    This (Google cache) interview with Hank Shocklee of the Bomb Squad and Chuck D discusses some of this stuff further.