complete press contact list for creative commons

["Glenn Otis Brown" <glenn AT creativecommons.org>]

press release
pdf attached
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GARAGEBAND ADOPTS CREATIVE COMMONS MUSIC SHARING LICENSE 

Web’s largest independent music community and Silicon Valley nonprofit
announce new copyright option for musicians.

San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA — June 7, 2004 — GarageBand.com
(http://www.garageband.com), the world’s largest musician community,
announced today that it will offer the Creative Commons Music Sharing
License as an optional tag for all songs uploaded to its website.  The
move delivers on GarageBand’s mission of empowering musicians and
redefining how music is discovered and promoted.

The license, provided by the nonprofit Creative Commons, permits fans not
only to download music files, but also to copy and share them, as long as
they don’t make commercial uses or alter the work. Such a license allows
musicians to harness the power of the Net for maximum promotion while
retaining rights to their work.  The simple and prominent display of the
license on each participating GarageBand.com song page lets fans know
what they can legally copy or share.

Since 1999, GarageBand.com has steadily grown to become the leading
community of independent musicians on the web.  Having augmented its
existing membership with a recently announced deal to resurrect the
former MP3.com archive, GarageBand now stands to offer Creative Commons
licensing to over 300,000 bands with over 1.8 million songs.  This will
potentially represent the largest source of legal free downloads and
P2P-safe music on the Internet.

 “GarageBand’s move to offer the Music Sharing License is huge step for
 the world of independent music,” said Lawrence Lessig, chairman of
 Creative Commons and professor of law at Stanford. “The Net has long
 facilitated music sharing and distribution — technically. Creative
 Commons Music Sharing License, now a part of GarageBand.com’s already
 excellent service, further facilitates sharing — legally.  It is a great
 confirmation for us that a site as notable as GarageBand.com has adopted
 our license.”

“Thanks to the innovative Creative Commons license, we can now offer
musicians a powerful new option to enable the spread of their music,”
said GarageBand CEO Ali Partovi, “By expanding beyond the traditional
boundaries of copyright law, this is an important step towards our vision
of a fairer, more efficient, and more creative music industry.”


About Tagging music as “Some Rights Reserved”

Creative Commons copyright licenses come in three expressions: (1) an
intuitive, plain-language summary (human-readable); (2) a thorough
copyright license complete with all the legal nitty-gritty
(lawyer-readable); and (3) a summary of the legal terms in mark-up
language, also referred to as metadata (machine-readable). GarageBand.com
now embeds the machine-readable layer into the code of its site, so that
search engines and fans can find and identify legally shared music.  

To see how the Creative Commons’ metadata search engine works, see:
<http://search.creativecommons.org/>.


About Creative Commons

A nonprofit corporation, Creative Commons promotes the creative reuse of
intellectual works — whether owned or in the public domain. It is
sustained by the generous support of the Center for the Public Domain,
the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Hewlett
Foundation. Creative Commons is based at Stanford Law School, where it
shares staff, space, and inspiration with the school's Center for
Internet and Society.

For general information, visit <http://creativecommons.org>.




About GarageBand.com

GarageBand (http://www.garageband.com) is the world’s largest musician
community and home to the definitive charts of independent music. Since
1999, fourteen of its highest-ranking bands have been signed by major
labels, including double platinum recording artists Drowning Pool, and
many more have scored licensing or publishing deals.  In April 2004,
GarageBand acquired exclusive rights to resurrect the former MP3.com
community of 250,000 artists and 1.7 million songs.  GarageBand.com uses
collaborative filtering to let ordinary people identify the best songs.
Recognized by TIME Magazine as one of 2003’s “50 Best Websites,”
GarageBand’s mission is to empower musicians and redefine how music is
discovered and promoted.

For more information, visit <http://www.garageband.com>.

Contact

Neeru Paharia
Assistant Director, Creative Commons
neeru AT creativecommons.org
650-724-3717

Paul de Benedictis
pdb AT garageband.com
650-303-2565

Press Kit

http://creativecommons.org/presskit/
http://www.garageband.com/htdb/companyinfo

---------------------
Glenn Otis Brown
Executive Director
Creative Commons
glenn AT creativecommons.org
+1.650.723.7572 (telephone)
+1.415.336.1433 (mobile)

Attachment: CC_Garageband.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document