Sharing is caring, it can be fun
Tue Nov 10, 2009 17:32 (UTC -5)The World of Stuff’s first original video in almost three years is hardly original at all… but that’s okay!
Here’s the skinny: Copyright law gives you the exclusive rights to the works you create, as evidenced in the familiar phrase, “All rights reserved.” Creative Commons is an organization that provides various licenses that you can apply to your works if you only want “some rights reserved.” Some licenses allow commercial uses of the work, others allow creating derivative works, etc. The Attribution and Attribution-Share Alike licenses are the most permissive.
Jamendo, one of my favorite web sites, allows musicians to post their Creative Commons-licensed songs for people to download at no cost. And a lot of it is is good stuff. I’ve rolled a custom RSS feed that lists the latest albums uploaded to Jamendo under either the Creative Commons Attribution or Attribution-Share Alike license. It lets me stay on top of things.
Recently, an artist named Josh Woodward released an album called Breadcrumbs on Jamendo. He followed up by releasing an instrumental version with the vocal tracks removed. Both versions were released under the Creative Commons Attribution license. It wasn’t long before another artist named Sean Wright added his own vocals to one of Woodward’s songs, and released it on Jamendo under the Attribution-Share Alike license. This is the kind of stuff that gets me going!*
Both songs are really great,** so I wondered what it would sound like if I synchronized them. I spent much of Sunday working to share the result. Hence The World of Stuff’s latest video, Creative Commons in Action: Josh Woodward and Sean Wright. Have a listen! They sound even better together. The best part is that I didn’t need to seek anyone’s permission to make the video; the Creative Commons licenses already granted it.
Here’s a bit of a technical background for the curious. I haven’t really worked with editing video since I was just starting out with Linux almost three years ago. The truth is that video editing software is the last frontier that Linux has yet to conquer. For this video, I used Pitivi, which is finally pretty stable and lacking only video effects (in my opinion). In the past, I might have used Kdenlive, the only other working video editing program for Linux that I’ve encountered, but it’s a KDE application, and I use GNOME. Other Linux users will hopefully understand this.
Also, it’s interesting to note that the video was produced entirely with free software and free formats. I started with Ogg Vorbis versions of the two songs (licensed as CC-BY and CC-BY-SA), combined them in Audacity, and saved the result as FLAC audio. The visuals were created using the similarly-licensed album artwork and Bitstream Vera Sans in the GIMP before being saved in PNG format. The video itself was produced in Pitivi and saved as Ogg Theora/Vorbis. I’ve licensed it as CC-BY-SA, and it’s available on YouTube as… Flash. Yeah, I know. But I have the original file if you want.
Just today, Sean Wright released more songs based on Josh Woodward’s instrumental tracks. If you enjoyed “From Your Lips,” do check them out!
This post is already running long, but here are a few links:
An instructional video: How to Make Your Own Soda. (Via Lifehacker)
Here’s a map showing the distance to the nearest McDonald’s for every point in the contiguous United States. The “McFurthest Spot” is somewhere in South Dakota. It’s a 233-kilometer drive from there to the nearest Golden Arches. (Via J-Walk Blog)
* Not the only stuff that gets me going
** I like the original better
