Support Creative Commons October 6, 2007
Creative Commons (CC) is holding their 2007 fundraiser now through Dec 31st and they need your help. Creative Commons licenses enable artists (an artist is you!) to grant some or all of their rights to the public while retaining others as opposed to an “all rights reserved” copyright. For example you can grant your fans the right to download your works for non-commercial uses as long as they give you credit, or not, it’s up to you. Creative Commons was officially launched in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig (wiki). Today there are many millions of works licensed under Creative Commons and that number is growing fast.
There’s a lot more to the Creative Commons web site than just Licenses though. CCmixter “is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons, where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want.” There are tens of thousands of samples and tracks from artists and recording labels like the freesound project, Magnatune, Fort Minor and more. All available for download legally, for free.
There are many more projects and tools on their Projects page and while you are there, think about supporting Creative Commons with a donation or buy some geek gear.
Free downloads 12, this time games! September 15, 2007
Continuing our free downloads series here is a new one that has some slightly different content from our usual links. Abandonia Reloaded is a site dedicated to remakes, freeware, and opensource games. The site has games spanning every genre so there is just about something for everyone there. So if your looking to waste some time give it a look.
Bound By Law, interview with the authors June 20, 2006
Wired has an interview with the law professors Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins, authors of Bound By Law? Tales From the Public Domain. Thanks reddit! We covered this wonderful Creative Commons comic book when it came out here.
Free Downloads 6, new album-mix-type-thingy March 28, 2006
The Kleptones announced the release of their new 2-CD album “24 Hours”. I am only half way through this amazingly cool collection of mash-ups but I will definitely be checking out their other 4 albums later. Thanks to BoingBoing for pointing us to this free download. You can download individual tracks, the whole album as one file, or all the tracks in one zip file.
While I was poking around at the Kleptones blog I came across a link to “Introduction to Copyfighting“, “a brief but informative introduction to the current on-line war of intellectual property rights” by Scott Kleper. It’s a good read while you are listening to some great tunes.
Bound By Law, Fair use comic March 15, 2006
The comic book “Bound by Law? (Tales from the Public Domain)” is a fantastically good read on copyright, fair use, and how they impact the making of documentary films. Created by three law professors at the Center for the Study of the Public Domain this is the most entertaining and informative book ever on the complicated subject of copyright. The story is based on Akiko, a filmmaker wanting to capture a day in the life of New York and dealing with all of the obstacles that copyright puts in the way.
“A documentary is being filmed. A cell phone rings, playing the “Rocky” theme song. The filmmaker is told she must pay $10,000 to clear the rights to the song. Can this be true?”
This book is a great educational resource as well as being a lot of fun to read. It’s published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license so you can read on line, download it, or buy it and help support this non-profit effort. I bought two, one to keep and one to pass around.
Free downloads 4, Evil free music March 3, 2006
I want to tell you about a record label that lets you listen to their entire catalog for free, Magnatune.com . I’m serious! They actually want you to listen to their stuff for free, no DRM, no time limits, no restrictions. And get this, you are not gonna believe this, they want you to share the mp3’s you get from them. They don’t mind. If all this were not insane enough they go right over the edge and let you use the music from their artists to create derivative works. They call it “Open Music” and describe it like this
“Open Music is music that is shareable, available in “source code” form, allows derivative works and is free of cost for non-commercial use. It is the concept of “open source” computer software applied to music.”
Free downloads 3, Legal Torrents for all February 24, 2006
Here is a site with loads of content under the Creative Commons license with the full permission of the rights holders to download for free. As LegalTorrents.com puts it,
“LegalTorrents is a collection of Creative Commons-licensed, legally downloadable, freely distributable creator-approved files, from electronic/indie music to movies and books, which we have made available via BitTorrent”
If music is what you are after, some of these archives are the better part of a gigabyte in size and some contain hundreds of mp3’s from a great number of artists. There is more than just music though, go explore this pocket of fair use friendly media. Happy downloading!
Free downloads 2, no law suits February 20, 2006
There are a tremendous number of artists out there who want you to download their work (for free), listen to it, and even use it to create new works. Opsound.org has a large collection of DRM-free music you can download.
Free downloads 1, no law suits February 16, 2006
I’m sure this service is way underused. On CreativeCommons.org there is a very large, very simple button that allows you to “search for Creative Commons audio, images, text, video, and other formats that are free to share on line.” It’s big and square and it has the word “Find” on it. you can’t miss it.
