This weekend is the 4th anniversary of the Creative Commons, with parties around the world. As an early start, and breaking new ground, Amsterdam had its first Creative Commons Salon last Wednesday, to bring together artists and content producers and give a preview of the CC DVD/CD mixing video and music from Dutch artists.

Sergio Messian explained how to make music and go to jail, with mashups as the ultimate example. That's music mashups, not website mashups, but beats can mix as easily as APIs. Just head over to ccMixter.org if you want to do that the legal way.

Sara Kolster and Derek Holzer showed their Sound Transit site of field recordings, where you can "book a flight" along recordings from various places around the world. Geo-tagged sounds that are just waiting for a mashup with flickr, to create instant soundtracks for photo albums.

Sylvian Zimmer presented Jamendo as a French site publishing CC-licensed music, and announced a full launch of Creative Commons in Luxemburg in June 2007. Jamendo streams some 2 million songs per month, says Sylvian. It reminded me of a presentation by Hindawi (see earlier post), publishing CC-licensed articles and books. Jamendo saw the first artists on the platform signing deals with "traditional" music distributors while keeping their Creative Commons license, but it will take some "big names" to push through before it really wil be relevant. In the meantime, artists use the platform to get early feedback on songs from fellow musicians, and sometimes release many versions of a song ("1.0 beta"), much like the open source adagio of "release early, release often". Many ears make buggy notes shallow?

An interesting example of the impact of copyrights that Sylvian gave was a tv station paying a blanket fee to be able to use any copyrighted material at any time. For such a station, Creative Commons is actually a problem, too much hassle to sort out, so they might stay away from CC-licensed content. It may take a fees collection organisation in one of the EU countries to start working with Creative Commons licenses to change that market, an area where the emerging common EU market and the breakdown of national monopolies might provide the dynamics to get to open content.

Happy birthday, Creative Commons :-)