Net music's next step

To file-sharing kids, a CD that tells you to go ahead, "rip, sample, mash, and store" these tunes to your heart's content, should be no big deal. In fact, the new, "100% legal" Wired CD, bundled into Wired magazine's November issue, is an anomaly - and an important next step for the online music scene. You can copy, share, remix, build on, do anything noncommercial that you want with the music on this CD of 16 songs, with the up-front permission of their creators - e.g., David Byrne, Chuck D, Gilberto Gil, Matmos, Spoon, Beastie Boys.

"It's the boldest experiment yet in trying to catalyze support for copyrights compatible with the digital reality of the 21st century," according to the San Jose Mercury News - an experiment by and with the Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization founded by Stanford law professor and copyright innovator Lawrence Lessig. For more on this milestone, please see the latest issue of my newsletter this week.