Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public. These licenses allow authors of creative works to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Content owners still maintain their copyright, but Creative Commons licenses give standard releases that replace the individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, that are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management.
A remix is a piece of media which has been altered or contorted from its original state by adding, removing, and/or changing pieces of the item. A song, piece of artwork, book, video, poem, or photograph can all be remixes. The only characteristic of a remix is that it appropriates and changes other materials to create something new.
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.
The Wired CD is an album that was released in 2004 as a collaborative effort between Wired magazine, Creative Commons, and sixteen musicians and groups. The Wired CD was distributed inside the front cover of the November 2004 issue of Wired, which also featured a variety of interviews and bios of the performers. Unusually, the songs were released under one of two Creative Commons Licenses, permitting sampling and file-sharing of the songs.
Remix culture, sometimes read-write culture, is a term describing a society that allows and encourages derivative works by combining or editing existing materials to produce a new creative work or product. A remix culture would be, by default, permissive of efforts to improve upon, change, integrate, or otherwise remix the work of copyright holders. While combining elements has always been a common practice of artists of all domains throughout human history, the growth of exclusive copyright restrictions in the last several decades limits this practice more and more by the legal chilling effect. In reaction, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, who considers remixing a desirable concept for human creativity, has worked since the early 2000s on a transfer of the remixing concept into the digital age. Lessig founded the Creative Commons in 2001, which released Licenses as tools to enable remix culture again, as remixing is legally prevented by the default exclusive copyright regime applied currently on intellectual property. The remix culture for cultural works is related to and inspired by the earlier Free and open-source software for software movement, which encourages the reuse and remixing of software works.
Freesound is a collaborative repository of CC licensed audio samples, and non-profit organisation, with more than 500,000 sounds and effects, and 8 million registered users. Sounds are uploaded to the website by its users, and cover a wide range of subjects, from field recordings to synthesised sounds. Audio content in the repository can be tagged and browsed by folksonomic means as well as standard text-based search. Audio content in the repository is also analysed using the open-source audio analysis tool Essentia, which powers the similarity search functionality of the site. Freesound has a RESTful API through which third-party applications can access and retrieve audio content and its metadata.
A Swarm of Angels (ASOA) was an open source film project and participatory film community, whose aim was to make the world's first Internet-funded, crewed and distributed feature film. The collaborative project aimed to attract 50,000 individual subscribers, each contributing £25 to the production, but after three years only 1,000 subscriptions were made. This feature film and associated original media project embraces the Creative Commons notion of flexible copyright licensing, to permit people to freely download, share, and remix the original media made for the project.
Lisa DeBenedictis is an American singer, songwriter, and record producer, who releases her music via a number of outlets including Magnatune and iTunes. DeBenedictis dropped out of music school, but can play the piano, guitar and mandolin. Her music contains mainly guitar and piano, with synth, smart and frequently dark lyrics.
Tamara Barnett-Herrin is an English singer-songwriter, who has sung with the group Freeform Five on the album Strangest Things which was released in 2005. A later project is the Calendar Songs album, an internet-based collaborative CC BY-NC-licensed project released in early 2008.
Open Source Cinema was a collaborative website created to produce the documentary film RiP!: A Remix Manifesto, a co-production with Montreal's EyeSteelFilm and the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). It was launched in 2004 as a public beta, and in 2007 launched at the South By Southwest Interactive festival on the Drupal platform.
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy is Lawrence Lessig's fifth book. The book was made available for free download and remixing under the CC BY-NC Creative Commons license via Bloomsbury Academic. It is still available via the Internet Archive. It details a hypothesis about the societal effect of the Internet, and how this will affect production and consumption of popular culture to a "remix culture".
ccHost is a web-based media hosting engine upon which Creative Commons' ccMixter remix web community is built. The software is written in PHP and uses the MySQL database server. In 2005 it won Linux World's award for Best Open Source solution.
Creative Commons is maintaining a content directory wiki of organizations and projects using Creative Commons licenses. On its website CC also provides case studies of projects using CC licenses across the world. CC licensed content can also be accessed through a number of content directories and search engines.
RiP!: A Remix Manifesto is a 2008 open-source documentary film about "the changing concept of copyright" directed by Brett Gaylor.
The Free Music Archive or FMA is an online repository of royalty-free music. Established in 2009 by the East Orange, New Jersey community radio station WFMU and in cooperation with fellow stations KBOO and KEXP, it aims to provide music under Creative Commons licenses that can be freely downloaded and used in other works. The service launched with an emphasis on curating high-quality works in a manner "designed for the age of the internet". Users can also "tip" musicians via donations.
Indaba Music is a web-based company that provides a music collaboration environment for musicians: "a place to build a profile, promote their tunes and collaborate with other musicians" as well as enter opportunities like remixing and songwriting contests with popular artists.
Open Game Art is a media repository intended for use with free and open source software game projects, offering open content assets.
Shannon Hurley is an American singer and songwriter. She was born in South Bend, Indiana and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She was voted by Rolling Stone as one of the top 25 artists on Myspace in 2006. Music from her 2007 debut album Ready To Wake Up was licensed by Muzak and has been played in department stores and restaurants throughout the world. Her music can be heard on television shows like The Young and the Restless, 90210, So You Think You Can Dance, American Idol and Giuliana and Bill, among others. Shannon's second full-length album, California, was released independently on July 2011 and her third full-length album, The Light, was released in 2014. She is also producer and main songwriter in the downtempo duo Lovers & Poets, along with husband and bassist Ben Eisen. Their self-titled debut album was released in 2010. Shannon was invited to be a featured vocalist on "Sun Gone Down", a track by Protoculture released in July 2011 on Re*brand/Armada Music. She has since become a sought-after vocalist and songwriter in the trance community. She has collaborated with trance producers such as Giuseppe Ottaviani, Ronski Speed and Alex M.O.R.P.H.
Bucky Jonson is an American band and production team from California. The group is composed of musicians Printz Board, George Pajon (guitars), Jr., Tim Izo and Keith Harris with their first album, "The Band Behind The Front," released in 2007 on the BBE label.
