Streamcast Looks to Creative Commons for Legitimacy

By | November 2nd, 2004 comments icon (0) Comments


After winning the first round of their battle with the music industry, Streamcast is acting to bolster their argument that P2P networks have legitimate uses and are not merely tools for massively multiplayer copyright infringement. Their newly released Morpheus 4.5 incorporates several features designed around the Creative Commons intellectual property license. Their motives are certainly suspect, but the end result could very well be the beginning of good things.

The Creative Commons license is designed to allow musicians, writers, and other creative people to release their work to the world at large while still retaining some level of ownership and control. In contrast to the traditional music publishing model, where labels basically rape both artists and consumers, the Creative Commons approach holds great promise.

In particular, this latest release of Morpheus allows artists to tag their work as being under the Creative Commons license, which in turn allows end users who download the work to get links back to the artist’s web site for more information. It’s not sliced-bread revolutionary, but it is a glimpse of the kind of value that P2P networks could offer artists in the future.

Streamcast’s incorporation of Creative Commons centric features could help both the P2P company and the intellectual property model achieve greater legitimacy.

Via: Techdirt





Filed in: Content Providers