Sampling and online reuse are enormously common in our culture today. But if you really believe in making some of that culture freely accessible, it follows you must also make free licenses explicit. Simply taking something because it’s there isn’t fair to the person who created the content, whose rights should come first, and it doesn’t help advance the cause of free content. If we want content to be more freely accessible, we need to give first priority to those materials explicitly licensed for free use.

All of that is to say, we need to obey the law. And that’s generally been the goal on CDM.

Here’s the rub: while Creative Commons licenses show a lot of promise, they also have occasionally run up against vague definitions or not-quite-airtight license variants. Case in point: the “non-commercial” restriction commonly used by creators. Let’s say you upload an image to Flickr. Adding a “non-commercial” restriction seems logical enough as a way to protect yourself against your image being abused, right?

Aud is either a “Music Industy insider with a finger on the pulse of more than BPM” or “consummate psuedonisticmusictechnophilosoph” or both. I got hip to his music through a friend who may soon be publicly identified, and have heard some really terrific productions (some not yet on the MySpace page yet). But I bring Aud to everyone’s attention in this case for his run-on rant poetry about the relative value of certain technological acheivements. If you could condense everything you feel about music technology into a 60-second speech in the local pub, it might come out something like this.

audnoyz – 36 – Male – UK [MySpace.com]

I submit in this age of “in the box” for some, where all is manipulatable and nothing is beyond reproach, the same holds true for noise found or contrived. All is art, all is beauty. ode to aud :-/ More Musings: The pub landlord rules! -Pro Tools: the mix bus sounds great through my Neve -Steinberg: what the fuck happened to you? -Sonar: time has been good to you -Live: awesome, awesome, awesome -DP: don’t get the respect it deserves- -Props for props- -Dangerous: now that’s some good noise- -Korg: CHAOS rules! -Adams: the best!- -Saxonia: German precision- Go SPL before play with your big knob- Liquid channel:too much- Duende:the sound is classic the UI could use some modernization- -RME: worth the extra quid- -64bit don’t mean shit on the dance floor- -Wavelab rules- Focusrite: RED!- TOFT: great stuff- Apogee:little brittle w/o nuts- Benchmark:solid-*** Wedlock is like a dongle*** +Mac still got it over PC+ Macbooks awesome, and you can you warm your tea on them too–Windows: why can’t you remember I already installed via that USB port already!- Mac towers: what you say I did not catch that, the fan is ON…- Robin Trower deserves more!- Jobs: Brilliant! Create a culture that hates Gates, that pays a premium for superior technology? while YOU profit from the biggest proprietary scheme ever devised…. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE my mac, I just hate Apple!– Ipod: freepass on this one… wait a minute, I got rid of my vinal for cassette because it was better, then to CD cuz it sounds better, now you want me to drop my CDs for inferior sound quality… BRILLIANT!

“Wedlock is like a dongle”, appearing on a t-shirt near you. (Perhaps for some it’s more like challenge-response authorization. Well, unless you pirated your significant other.)