Something That Happened.

"Copylefting Your Podcasts"

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Transcript:

It's easy to satisfy your audience by appealing to their vanity; listen to the opening track of John Holowach's A Basement Of Broken Dreams and you'll immediately understand, before even hearing a single bar of music, why I - that ego I sometimes refer to as me - am enjoying this particular remix artist's latest release. That is, if you recognize my voice, because you'll hear that my utterances are mixed into John's opening track "Hello World" and elsewhere in the recording, and it gives me some kind of thrill to hear my own personal timbre mixed, reworked, and completely transformed through the manipulations of someone else's artistry. If only I could do those things with my voice through sheer willpower; I'd have quite a career as a voice actor. But enough about me...

John Holowach is a remix artist. He is also a samplist and a recording artist, but these are just labels. What John does is take music and sounds created by others, transform the works, and create new sounds. Beautiful sounds. Gorgeous musical compositions derived from other recordings but rearranged and transformed so skillfully that you'd have some measure of difficulty extracting John's source recordings from his final pieces. For example, take a listen to John's "Blue Dreams", which samples and remixes, in part, Thievery Corporation's "DC 3000". (That is, if my ears serve me right.)

But wait a minute - isn't that illegal? Isn't sampling wrong? No, not at all - not in a brave new world which includes Creative Commons licenses. The RIAA's sad manipulation of copyright legislation, while pretending to protect the recording artists' royalties, have done nothing but leave us with a slew of restrictions aimed at protecting the "Big Five" recording companies' coffers. So to protect the recording artist in the 21st century, Creative Commons has come to the rescue, developing a series of copyright (or is it copyleft?) licenses designed to be more flexible while simultaneously protective of the artist's intent. These commons deeds are becoming increasingly popular and were recently showcased on the Wired CD featuring, among other artists, the Beastie Boys, Chuck D, and Thievery Corporation. The particular deeds applied to the works on the Wired CD allow anyone to freely distribute the artists' works - and to remix, sample, and transform these works creatively; there's even a contest for the best remix of this CD (deadline Feb. 12, 2005).

So why would anyone want to make their work available for free? As those who have done so can attest, opening up creative work to be freely distributed and/or sampled most often increases the likelihood that their work will actually be listened to by others. Artists like John and another artist I've recently been downloading, Canton, have seen their music gain popularity since they began delivering their music under Creative Common licenses. Other artists using these deeds have also experienced remarkably improved CD sales as a direct result of the increased exposure they've received since freeing up their work, so the commons deeds make a great deal of sense for those seeking compensation for their work.

I recently began podcasting, and I've made my recordings available under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license. Essentially, this is the most open license of them all, enabling anyone to copy, sample and redistribute my work. They may even receive financial compensation for their use of my audio. The license I've chosen requires, as one of its conditions, that anyone who uses my audio give me credit for my contribution. That sounds fair to me; I just want to be heard. Yet some artists may wish for a more restrictive license for their work, and stricter deeds are certainly available.

By making my recordings available this way, John was able to utilize the material without having to negotiate through a third party, such as the RIAA. He also wasn't required to contact me for permission to use my voice, since I had already granted that permission through the license (though, out of courtesy, John did so anyway). This saving of overhead and time can be vital to the creative processes of the artist, who may be working within a timeframe that doesn't allow for days, weeks, or months of negotiating for copyrights. The artist can immediately continue focusing on what she does best, rather than having to become a copyright expert or hire a copyright lawyer to sort through the legal mess the RIAA has created for us.

John has chosen a slightly different type of license for his recordings than I have: a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike deed. The key difference between my Attribution license and John's Attribution-ShareAlike designation is that anyone who uses his John's work must also use the same license in distributing the resulting work. Share alike, in other words. So what I plan on doing - and John doesn't know this yet, though he soon will - is take some of John's work and sample it for my own podcast. I like to tell stories, and John's music provides for some outstanding atmosphere. The only problem I'm going to have with using John's work is in enjoying his music too much, rather than getting on with recording and mixing my podcast.

Enjoy John Holowach's A Basement of Broken Dreams by freely downloading it at the Internet Archive or by visiting his website, narphonax.com.

Please send me typed or audio comments; email them to harold.johnson@gmail.com. Any comments sent to me may end up being posted to this site or incorporated into my podcast!