Creative Commons Brazil

Creative Commons Team, Brazil (.mpg File)

Well, I'm doing a different kind of plug for this post... Many of you out there are already pretty familiar with the Creative Commons system, and for those of you, this post will only slightly be of interest. But to the rest of the world, this post will hopefully tune you into an amazing worldwide project that could potentially change the way the arts do business.

The Creative Commons is a system of licencing designed to give control over the rights to works back to the artist. Basically, with a Creative Commons licence, an artist can reserve as few or as many rights as they so desire, enabling artists to allow their music to be downloaded, distributed, sampled, and whatever else can be done. Obviously the potential for this is infinite.

In the U.S., the Creative Commons licence has had trouble catching on for a multitude of obvious reasons, and hasn't really spread beyond a limited world of people that know what it is. For that reason, the Creative Commons team has targeted a group of nations around the world where its reception would be kinder, and are procuring these nations to adopt the system.

In Brazil, Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil has expressed a great deal of interest in the project, lending his star-power to the project for visibility. Gil's song, Oslodum, has been made available to the public, free of charge, and kickstarted the movement in Brazil. Ostensibly, you can use the Gil track in whatever manner you choose, as long as you don't profit from it.

Brazil seems like an ideal experiment, for many reasons. Of course, anyone that frequents this page is aware of the rich culture that lies in the land of order and progress. But the extremely unequal distribution of wealth has created a culture that is far less centered around profit margins than the U.S., so it will be interesting to see if it catches on. Already, a number of similar projects are underway, such as Trama Virtual, created by Trama Records to showcase independent talents, and sort of a Brazilian version of the now-deceased www.mp3.com (the old version where independent bands could market themselves free of charge).

As one of the members of the Creative Commons team said, "If the Blues had been copyrighted while it was being created, we wouldn't have any of the music we have today." How true it is. This project is quite impressive, and deserves all the support it can get. Check out the video up top, and for more information, check out Wired Magazine's article on the experiement for a brief summary of their work in Brazil.