NIN’s CC-Licensed Best-Selling MP3 Album

Fred Benenson, January 5th, 2009

NIN’s Creative Commons licensed Ghosts I-IV has been making lots of headlines these days.

First, there’s the critical acclaim and two Grammy nominations, which testify to the work’s strength as a musical piece. But what has got us really excited is how well the album has done with music fans. Aside from generating over $1.6 million in revenue for NIN in its first week, and hitting #1 on Billboard’s Electronic charts, Last.fm has the album ranked as the 4th-most-listened to album of the year, with over 5,222,525 scrobbles.

Even more exciting, however, is that Ghosts I-IV is ranked the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon’s MP3 store.

Take a moment and think about that.

NIN fans could have gone to any file sharing network to download the entire CC-BY-NC-SA album legally. Many did, and thousands will continue to do so. So why would fans bother buying files that were identical to the ones on the file sharing networks? One explanation is the convenience and ease of use of NIN and Amazon’s MP3 stores. But another is that fans understood that purchasing MP3s would directly support the music and career of a musician they liked.

The next time someone tries to convince you that releasing music under CC will cannibalize digital sales, remember that Ghosts I-IV broke that rule, and point them here.

Public Domain Day 2009

Mike Linksvayer, January 1st, 2009

Recent link offerings in celebration of Public Domain Day, which is January 1…

Creative Commons Switzerland informs us of a Public Domain Day jam session/brunch in Zurich:

Short English Summary: We will celebrate the public domain day on January 1 in Zurich. We will read, perform, transform works from authors whose work are in the public domain.

Tuesday CC board member Michael Carroll blogged about the meaning and potential of the Digital Public Domain and last month about things made possible by the public domain.

CC board chair James Boyle’s recently published must read book is titled The Public Domain.

LibriVox just reached 2000 recordings of books in the public domain. The recordings are also in the public domain. We noted their 1500 recording milestone in June, 2008. Number 2000 is The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol. VI. Listen to all six volumes in 2009!

Watch for much more about the public domain around the world in 2009 and revisit Public Domain Day 2008.

Addendum: Also see PDD2009 posts by John Mark Ockerboom and Elizabeth Townsend on works now in the public domain.

Microsoft jumps in to put us over the top!

Melissa Reeder, December 30th, 2008

We’ve just gotten word that Microsoft has upped its pledge by $15,000 to put us over the top for the year. Microsoft has been a corporate sponsor of Creative Commons for the past 4 years and we’re delighted to have their continued support.

$12k to go, a message from CC CEO Joi Ito

Joi Ito, December 29th, 2008

Joi Ito / Photo by Mizuka / CC BY

Happy Holidays — I hope many of you are getting a chance to relax after an incredibly difficult year for most people. However, take heart, I’m writing with good news. We’re now entering the last couple of days for the Creative Commons annual fundraising campaign just $12,000 short of our $500,000 goal. In such a harsh fundraising climate, we’re coming very close to reaching our goal thanks to the generous support of our community — we need your help in getting all the way there.

My work this year has been primarily focused participating in Creative Commons as its new CEO, which has had its challenges and its reasons for hope this year.

Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization run mostly by volunteers all over the world. The board and the CEO role are volunteer jobs and in fact each board member is also a financial supporter. Even with the support of a network of volunteers, Creative Commons requires a small number of underpaid staff and some basic infrastructure to survive and continue its mission.

Creative Commons started as a primarily author and musician focused idea from the United States and has grown to a global 50 jurisdiction project in contact with 80 countries making impact in the sharing of scientific materials and data to helping teachers to share teaching material. We have forged alliances with rights collection societies and other organizations that have been, at times, critical of our work. We worked together with the dedicated team at the Free Software Foundation to permit the FSF licensed wikis (including Wikipedia) to relicense to a CC license. We have many more countries to bring online and many more fields to cover, but I am very proud of our work and extremely confident of our ability to become the basic infrastructure to “save failed sharing” as our Chairman Jamie Boyle puts it. I believe that we will soon be another basic layer of interoperability, similar to the World Wide Web or the Internet Protocol.

It has also been a tough year for Creative Commons. It has been particularly challenging for us as corporations and major donors have had to slash, if not completely cut, their philanthropic support. However, we have had more individual and smaller corporate donors than ever in our history. I would like to thank, from the bottom of my heart, all of our current donors who decided to stick with us through this tough period and all the new donors who have chosen to give this year.

In addition, our project funding has become difficult in many areas and needs more support to survive and any funds past our annual campaign target will go to providing very needed resources. I apologize for continuing to pester you through the year and especially during this fundraising campaign, but your participation and contribution are extremely important for our future. I promise you that every yen, dollar and rupee is well spent on supporting and furthering the cause and I beg you (only if it helps) to consider making a donation if you have not done so this year.

Thank you in advance.

- Joi

Final Commoner Letter: Jimmy Wales

Melissa Reeder, December 23rd, 2008

Our final commoner letter of this campaign comes from Jimmy Wales, who needs no introduction.

If you haven’t contributed, now is the time. Please help spread this letter far and wide. Now, Jimmy Speaks…

—————–

Dear Creative Commoner,

Creative Commons recently celebrated its 6th birthday, and I want to take a moment to ask for your support of CC’s vital role in building a commons of culture, learning, science, and more, accessible to all.

When I founded Wikipedia in 2001, Creative Commons unfortunately did not yet exist. However, as by far the most wildly successful projects for the creation of and legal infrastructure for free knowledge in the world, our paths are inevitably intertwined.

For example, we have Wikinews publishing under CC BY, Wikimedia Commons curating thousands of quality images and other media, many under CC BY or BY-SA, Wikimedia chapters in Serbia and Indonesia as the Creative Commons affiliate organizations in those jurisdictions, Wikimedia Sweden and Creative Commons Sweden collaborating with Free Software Foundation Europe to put on FSCONS, and Creative Commons’ international office in Berlin just moved in with Wikimedia Germany.

Most importantly, we have people working to build free knowledge around the world, collaborating mostly informally. Some see themselves as part of one or more movements and communities, others just want to share and collaborate.

I’ve been pleased to personally serve on the CC board of directors since 2006 and am happy that after years of work, the Wikimedia community has obtained the option to update its primary license to CC BY-SA. This would remove a significant barrier to collaboration among people and communities creating free knowledge, a barrier that only exists due to the timing mentioned above.

As I explain in Jesse Dylan’s A Shared Culture, Creative Commons is about building infrastructure for a new kind of culture  — one that is both a folk culture, and wildly more sophisticated than anything before it. Think about how quaint a traditional encyclopedia appears, now that we have Wikipedia. How much better would the world be if we allow education, entertainment, government, science and more to be transformed by the web? If we do not support Creative Commons, the realization of these dreams about what the Internet can and should become are at risk. By supporting Creative Commons, we build those dreams.

Allow me to close with a borrowing. Eben Moglen, chief lawyer of the free software movement, without which neither Wikipedia nor Creative Commons would exist, wrote the following at the end of the first letter of this campaign:

Supporting Creative Commons isn’t just something I feel I ought to do; it’s something we all have to do. I hope you will join with me in supporting Creative Commons with your money, with your energy, and with your creative power. There’s nothing we can’t do if we share.

Thank you,
Jimmy Wales