"Again, I do not know that the bloggers didn’t write the photographers to obtain commercial-use permission. But I doubt it. My judgement is borne from personal experience. I see my images popping up on commercial blogs all the time, and fewer than one in ten asks my permission.

I don’t mean to single out WIRED, either. I’m only picking on them for the recent ant example. In reality, many commercial blog networks show rampant disregard for the rights of artists, photographers, and musicians. They may not have been caught, yet, but they could incur substantial legal liability when a copyright owner decides to seek damages. After all, using an image beyond the bounds of the license is breaking the law.

The bottom line is this: if someone else’s creative work is helping you make money, you have a moral and a legal obligation to reach an agreement with that person about the terms of use. Creative Commons is supposed to make this easier, but it only works if the content consumers treat CC as a contract and not a blanket license for free use. Creative Commons is not public domain."

The group ended up recording a 6 song album, “Nighty Night,” in the space of 12 hours. You can listen to the full record streaming on Amanda Palmer’s site.

The Creative Commons-released material and somewhat egalitarian nature of the project has led to the online SFF and rock communities picking up the music and using it to craft their own original works. Below the cut, we list the coolest videos that have grown out of the project so far!

"The following groups strengthen Open.Michigan through related efforts, resources, input, and ongoing discussion around the initiative."

"About the Book: This is an open set of lecture notes on metaheuristics algorithms, intended for undergraduate students, practitioners, programmers, and other non-experts. It was developed as a series of lecture notes for an undergraduate course I taught at GMU. The chapters are designed to be printable separately if necessary. As it's lecture notes, the topics are short and light on examples and theory. It's best when complementing other texts. With time, I might remedy this."

"The goal of this project is to spread media content that is licensed under Creative Commons throughout the web in much the same way that weblogs spread CC licensed text."

"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."

Summary of OK vs. CC similarities and differences

The movie's logo is lifted directly from a paper published under a CC remix+by-attribution license. So that will be an interesting thing to see play out.

"A public realm needs scarcity: without constraint we devolve into the weak forces of diffusion..."

...[t]he purpose of Free Culture is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge cultural freedom.