The new design, which went live almost a week ago, contains very little information about the licenses used, making it all but impossible for site users to comply with them.

Creative Commons is a widely used (including by TorrentFreak) licence system that gives artists/creators the ability to grant permissions for reuse.

The terms are specified in the license, and have become an internet standard in many ways. Yet without an easy way to tell which of the licenses is being used, it causes problems for reuse and distribution – the entire point of both the license, and Jamendo.

Worse, since the work’s license is not being displayed adequately (as described in Creative Common’s guide to marking content) Jamendo may be in breach of the Creative Commons license themselves.

Creative Commons told us that it was not ideal, and that they will be reaching out to Jamendo to fix things and make licensing clearer.

Morgane Dourthe, Sales Team Leader at Jamendo told TorrentFreak “This new version of Jamendo is a first release and a lot things still needs to be improved and modified.” They added that they would be discussing many points this week, and that this would be among them.

For the sake of clarity and compliance, for both artists and users, the sooner the better.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The group recently sent an invoice to the organizers of a dance event where only Creative Commons licenced music was played.

The organizers of the event had informed GEMA beforehand that they would only play royalty-free CC music, but the music rights group isn’t buying this ‘excuse’.

After inspecting the list of tracks that were played, GEMA sent a 200 euro invoice to the organizers. The group claims that some of the artists on the list are very familiar to “pseudonyms” that are also registered with GEMA.

Since German case law dictates that the burden of proof lies with the people who hosted the event, the organizers now have to prove that these artists are not associated with GEMA. This is a problem, since these netlabel artists are often hard to trace, and some are not even known publicly by their full names.

An absurd, unworkable and totally outdated situation.

The process may have made sense 15 years ago when nearly all artists were members of royalty agencies, but not anymore. Today there are hundreds of thousands of creators who publish their work under Creative Commons licenses, and many of them are musicians. Why should they have to prove that they are not related to a royalty collecting agency?

Unfortunately GEMA’s ‘mistake’ of claiming money from Creative Commons content is not an isolated incident. Just a few weeks ago the group demanded money from the nonprofit organization Musikpiraten for publishing a CD with Creative Commons licensed tracks.

At the time GEMA used the same arguments, but the claims turned out to be a mistake.

Michael Koch, singer and guitarist of “the.princess.and.the.pearl,” was one of the people who had to prove that he was not a member of GEMA. Kock cancelled his membership earlier because it did more harm than good.

“We don’t think highly of GEMA. I used to be a member, and our band actually lost a couple of gigs, because the organisers of small festivals were unable to afford the GEMA fees, of which hardly anything flows back to the band in terms of royalties,” he said.

“The fact that we, as non-members, must prove that our music has not been composed by a GEMA member, demonstrates that the society has too much power – and that it abuses it ruthlessly,” Koch added.

German Pirate Party chairman Christian Hufgard recently filed a complaint through which he hopes to reverse this backwards situation, and put the burden of proof on GEMA instead of the artists and organizers of music events.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

However, with the decision to choose Joe Biden as VP, many worried that with his ties to copyright lobby groups, he would influence things to further increase the reach of already-draconian laws. Despite this, he was endorsed by both Lawrence Lessig, and the US Pirate Party, with the former’s wife even campaigning for him.

After his election he wasted little time in establishing a ‘transition’ website at change.gov. However, to the dismay of some, the copyright notices were as draconian as ever. That has all changed now, though, as the site embraces Creative Commons, opting for CC-BY. While Obama is not exactly a stranger to Creative Commons licensing – his flickr photos are under a CC BY-NC-SA license – it is no small step to go from photo album to entire website.

What does this mean for copyright? Well, as Creative Commons themselves point out in their blog, the group behind change.gov is not a part of the government – yet. It’s a non-profit organization, so could (and did) fill the site with copyright notices. Yet, that a Creative Commons license has been embraced by the President-Elect means good things. Most importantly, that the President has knowledge of less-restrictive copyright methods, and first-hand experience that not only do they work, but that the sky doesn’t fall down when they are used, cannot hurt. That the license chosen was, in Lessig’s words, the ‘freest license’ is more encouraging still.

One can only hope that when the likes of the RIAA and MPAA come to talk about further strengthening copyright, he turns around and says, “I’ve been using these great CC licenses, have you heard of them?” Regardless, it’s a great boost to Creative Commons, as they prepare to celebrate their sixth birthday.

TorrentFreak articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 license.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Amongst other things, Anthony from antbag.com makes WordPress themes – he gives them away for free but if someone wants to donate, they can. His work is released under Creative Commons 3.0 license, which means that if someone wants to use a theme ‘as is’ or modified in some way, they are required to credit him. A link in the footer of every theme he creates points back to Anthony’s site – this is the minimum attribution he expects, which is pretty damn reasonable.

So imagine Anthony’s surprise when he discovered that his NetWorker theme for WordPress had been used by the British government without honoring the Creative Commons license. The theme has been heavily modified, including the removal of all links back to his site, but Anthony has been able to verify from the source files that Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s own website is in fact built on NetWorker.

It is clear that Brown’s site indeed uses the Anthony’s theme – violating the Creative Commons license. Not only was the link to the the original removed, Brown’s site should have also made their version available under a similar license – share alike.

Still, the site even claims it is protected by Crown Copyright – a quick look at the CSS for the theme should dispel that myth.

Anthony sent an email to the company who developed the site who claimed that although they did some testing on the NetWorker theme, they then rebuilt it from scratch. Unfortunately, according to Anthony “they failed to remove the credits in the CSS file that named the theme ‘NetWorker’ or to change the theme folder which is named ‘NetWorker-10′ (Networker version 1.0).”

There is a campaign running in the UK right now featuring “Knock-Off Nigel” along with cringe-worthy videos depicting this fictitious character as some kind of social outcast.

One would think that Mr Brown would avoid the sort of behavior that could easily make him the star of the next campaign but if it’s good enough for the MPAA, it must be good enough for him.

Update: We were contacted by Dave Smith, Managing Director of New Media Maze, the creators of the Number 10 site. He has a full statement on this issue which is available here, but in summary, here is his explanation, in his own words:

1. The only file that was drawn upon from AntÂ’s theme was the CSS file, a fact that we have never denied.

4. Therefore we have abided by the license of AntÂ’s work and are not guilty of ‘ripping off’ anyone’s work.

For his part, Anthony doesn’t wish to prolong the conflict. Click here for an update from him.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

One of these new developments has been the addition of increasing numbers of Creative Commons (CC) licensed material. Creative Commons media is licensed by the creator, to be shared – usually with some restrictions – and is the same license used by TorrentFreak. It’s not a niche license, instead it is becoming increasingly popular, with Nine Inch Nails having released their Ghosts album under a CC license earlier this year.

With this is mind, isoHunt has announced a partnership with Jamendo, a site that deals in Creative Commons licensed music. Reaching the 10,000 album milestone only days ago, content available on Jamendo is growing quickly and when you grow, it helps to be able to get the content out there. This is why isoHunt decided to partner with several BitTorrent sites. isoHunt’s owner, Gary Fung, has been a long time supporter of Creative Commons and public domain works, and has stated that there is a strong future in Creative Commons material at isoHunt.

Laurent Kratz, CEO of Jamendo told TorrentFreak “Jamendo uses the Creative Commons licensing scheme to keep the rules very straight forward : copy as much as you can eat, the artist, the right-holders are ok. The new thing about partnering with a torrent portal like isoHunt, is that Jamendo has started an editorial work on top.”

“We receive up to 500 new albums per week, from more than 60 countries in the world,” Kratz said. “In order to maximize the interest of millions using torrent search engines every day, it was critical to only highlight a subset of all the albums we receive every day. It’s not about discriminating one band from another, it’s about getting anonymous BitTorrent fans to Jamendo, and discovering unsigned bands from everywhere in the world.”

Jamendo is also partnering with SumoTorrent, and torrent.to, and has been experimenting with mininova. In addition, their torrents are also available through Vuze. What better way to “stick it to the **AA” as so many of our commenters put it, than to ignore their memberships product, and use sites like this instead.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

A few months ago Carless gathered a group of involved people who decided to rebuild the site, in order to make it easier for users and independent publishers to add their own content. Legaltorrents aims to build an active community where users and content publishers will both benefit from.

LegalTorrents’ Jonathan Dugan told TorrentFreak: “We wanted to build a participatory community to keep the site going, and we wanted to provide a real model for content creators to share their work and be paid via donations.”

The new and improved site focuses on Creative Commons licensed content, which can be shared freely. Contrary to most other sites, publishers can choose to accept donations. A small percentage (15%) of the donations will go to the LegalTorrents team, to cover server costs and such.

Unlike in 2003, LegalTorrents now has quite a bit of competition. BitTorrent Inc., Vuze and mininova all offer content distribution platforms for independent publishers today, and NiN recently chose The Pirate Bay to share their latest album.

“BitTorrent Inc, Vuze and mininova are indeed the closest matches to LegalTorrents,” Jonathan Dugan says “However, all of them take a very commercial angle, we are taking a community participation angle.”

The site does not allow anonymous uploads but users can add content to the site once they are approved, similar to mininova’s CD, Vuze and BitTorrent. LegalTorrents hopes to add to this by creating a community where content creators can get paid for their efforts, while sharing it with others.

Recently, more and more publishers have started to use BitTorrent to distribute their works, so their is certainly a market for a site such as Legaltorrents. However, the success of the site will largely depend on the size and participation level of the community, both users and publishers.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Jamendo has a great look and the site is easy to navigate. It supports tagging, playlists, album blogging and all the other features a “social” music sharing community needs. The site continues to grow and they recently received a significant amount of funding from Mangrove Capital Partners, the same people who supported Skype in its early days. With this funding, they plan improve the site and introduce new features.

David Waroquier, of Mangrove Capital Partners said in a response: “With the aim at becoming the biggest independent music portal online, we believe Jamendo is the most appropriate and flexible answer to the current online revolution that the music industry is facing: providing unsigned artists with revenue opportunities all the while enabling the users to listen and download music for free”, said .

Laurent Kratz Founder and CEO of Jamendo was of course very satisfied with the first round of funding they closed and commented: “With this funding, we plan to become the undisputed global player of free music. We are economically supporting and promoting the long tail of music. We have a proven business model where music is not only proposed for free to end consumers but we are also closing an increasing number of partnership agreements and licensing deals.”

All albums are available in MP3 (~200Kbps) and Ogg Vorbis (300Kbps) format, and can be downloaded with your favorite BitTorrent client or Emule. A great initiative that benefits both the artist and the fans, that’s how it’s supposed to be.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

All albums are Creative Commons licensed, and available in MP3 (~200Kbps) and Ogg Vorbis (300Kbps) format. They can be downloaded with your favorite BitTorrent client and Emule.

Jamendo has more great features. You can share albums you like on your blog, write a review, or make a donation to support your favorite artist. Some artists already promised to include a list of supporters in the booklet of their forthcoming albums. Both artists and music fans will profit from this model. Everybody wins, except for the big record companies of course.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The Kleptones are still looking for artists for their mash-ups. So if you’re an artist who’s publishing work under a Creative Commons license, join the team! TorrentFreak joined the Swarm as a media partner a while ago, and we will keep you up-to-date with the latest news.

So, if you’ve you always wanted to be involved in the production of a major feature film, here’s your chance. The project is about to reach the end of its second phase and signups are going to be frozen. So get in while you still can.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Creative Commons uploaded their short videos to Revver, and as long as the campaign lasts Creative Commons will collect all the ad revenue. The fundraising campaign will end December 31, 2006 and has already been quite successful since Google announced that it will donate $30,000.

For those who never heard of Creative Commons, check out the video…

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.