Business 2.0 on Creative Commons, The Economics of Sharing


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I’m reading though the dead tree version of the May issue of Business 2.0.  There is a great article on Creative Commons licensing starting on page 112.  It leads off by highlighting the experience of Allan Vilhan, aka Cargo Cult.  Allan has put his music online at Magnatune under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.  He has since been contacted by a game developer and a design firm and licensed his work for over $1000.  He’s really good.  I’m listening to Alchemy right now and it rocks.

Magnatune has something going here.  Any artists music can be downloaded for free, but they make purchasing high quality copies of the music (WAV, Ogg, FLAC, MP3 etc) inexpensive and easy.  Listeners can elect to pay anywhere from $5 to $18 for an album, with half of that money going directly to the artist.  The website also makes it extremely easy to inquire about licensing music for commercial use.

Back to the article, there is also a good interview with Lessig about Creative Commons, copyrights, and court decisions that went “the other way.”  It’s definitely read worthy.