Creative Commons Remix Contest

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."

Comments

do you know how old "re-mixed" material is?

[museumpeace]

The Feb issue of Scientific American has an editorial on the history of the idea of copyrights...it begins with a terse description of how Shakespeare borrowed most of Romeo&Juliet:

If William Shakespeare were working today on Broadway or in London's West End, he would be spending a lot of time with lawyers. The Bard adapted Romeo and Juliet from Arthur Brooke's poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, which Brooke, in his turn, had based on a French translation by Pierre Boaistuau of various Italian stories. The history of creative works, whether Romeo and Juliet or the Beastie Boys' "Pass the Mic," is a chronicle of "borrowing" from others. Intellectual property lawyers might use a harsher word. But the framers of the Constitution always intended to provide owners of creative works with only limited monopolies, ensuring that the public gets the right to fashion new works from old..

Re:do you know how old "re-mixed" material is?

[Quixote]

ensuring that the public gets the right to fashion new works from old..

As Newton said, "If I have seen further, it is because I've stood on the shoulders of giants" (or something to that effect).

Without "borrowing" or creative re-interpretation, most creative efforts will wither and die. Not surprisingly, the artists understand this and agree with this; it is the media companies which are the roadblocks. To them, art is just a product that needs to be sold to the masses; it doesn't matter how it is produced, as long as noone else "steals" it (just like Nike doesn't care where the sneakers are made and who makes them).

Re:do you know how old "re-mixed" material is?

[museumpeace]

And I think it is worth emphasizing, especially to purists [typically with little creative work to their credit] that slam plagerism, that it is the remix, Shakespeare's derivative work, that has been esteemed the greater work of art by 300 years of critics, teachers and audiances, not the work of Brooke. I would venture that the one moment in history when any work of literature or music is "perfected" occurs only in the mind of the artist and only at the point when he or she ceases fussing with the product. From that moment on, others may find a way to make the result more appealing or more compelling or just plain better at least to some audiance in some particular time and culture.

Re:The Beastie Boys? David Byrne?

[Dr.Opveter]

They have to perform a lot. Many bands that give away their albums on mp3 would like the increase their popularity so that next time they're in town you will go see their concert/performance.
Anyway, doing a couple of CC tracks doesn't mean you can't release a regular full album later that might score increased sales because of the band/group's exposure by the CC tracks.

Re:The Beastie Boys? David Byrne?

[dcarey]

I understand your situation is different if you are making music for a living, but in recent times there has been such a surge of amateur musicians who are technologically-savvy.

Take me for example. I had the unfortunate realisation at age 25 that I was not going to be a rock and roll star, so I switched gears and got a CS degree. But I told myself that I would always make music, but it would have to be in hobby form from now on. Fortunatley with a CS degree I would be able to afford some nice toys for that hobby (at least in theory ...)

Well it worked, and I'm now in the process of recording an album. No, Island records has not flown me to NY for a posh recording session with cameos by Steven Tyler, but I make great sounding music recording the album 100% digitally, with not much $$ invested, thanks to technologies like this (heck, the software was free -- Garageband).

The point is many people like me who always wanted to record in a studio now can -- they can build one that is relatively inexpensive -- and those are the type of people that enjoy tools like this.

I would not be surprised in the future if we see a few people out there who were working professionals who suddenly become famous for musical works they did as a hobby with no intention of making it big in the first place.

Chuck D. did this on Revolverlution.

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

I kind of think of Revolverlution as an open source album. Public Enemy released a few of their tracks on a website, and had a contest for the best remix. The best one got on the CD once it was pressed.

PE has been in the forefront of digital music releases for some time now. Def Jam wouldn't release "Bring the Noise 2000", so PE released it online. Def Jam sued, said they owned all rights to PE music, even though this was all remixes, and didn't want to sell it anyway. In the resultant dust-up, Chuck and Flav split from Def Jam, released the single "Swindler's Lust" for free to show their anger at being owned, and helped in the start of Atomic Pop, what was one of the first Internet focused labels. Atomic Pop released "There's a Poison Going On" (with Swindler's Lust) for $8 download only, $10 pressed, with an autograph from Chuck. They eventually folded, and it was weird seeing "Poison" at Virgin for $18 when I got it for $10. Chuck still has some links from http://www.rapstation.com/ and http://www.bringthenoise.com/ used to be a PE oriented site, now looks like Fark for Hip-Hop news.

Flikr/del.ciou.us?

[Kenrod]

Flikr/del.ciou.us

I hate it when I slam my head into the keyboard too.

Re:Is Chuck D.'s next CD going to be free?

[boodaman]

You're not getting it.

The Creative Commons license doesn't say anything about prohibiting commercial use of content. In fact, depending on which Creative Commons license you choose, commercial use is explicitly allowed.

You might want to check out the Creative Commons site, which explains the different licenses very clearly.

In short, an artist can retain copyright and control of a song, but allow others to freely use parts of the song (or all of the song) as long as they comply with certain restrictions. Sometimes, those restrictions include not using the song for commercial gain without the copyright holder's consent.

If the license covering the uploaded remixes is something like the CC Attribution-ShareAlike license, then the uploaded remix can be used commercially provided the person using it gives attribution to the author and allows distribution using the same license.

You might want to check the Creative Commons site...there's lots of info there. In short, depending on the license covering the uploaded remix, there's nothing at all preventing Chuck D from including the remix in a commercial distribution.

Re:Where is the talent here?

[ZZabinski]

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.