I think that the current crop of intellectual property issues spawn folks with reasonable if widely divergent points of view from a number of different camps. They also spawn some pretty patently unreasonable points of view.

I agree that one need not assert that permissive licensing is the only way to go. Others may, and do, ply the turbid waters of the borders of fair use. A goodish number hoist the jolly roger and head for the open, if somewhat sargasso, copyright-evading sea.

I posit, as I think this post does, that Creative Commons licenses are less the Key to All Mythologies than a very useful socket wrench to achieve a given set of goals. When I make culture “in real time”, I don’t want to hassle with civil disobedience or with reading the latest fair use decisions from the federal courts. I’d rather just know I am using licensed material from mixter or freesound or a netlabel, and give attribution and credit where due.

Personally, I think that ccmixter is already quite open to collaborative endeavors. People contact one about working together on things, or checking out if a use is okay. I like to remix in photo and video, and certainly mixter content as well as CC flickr content can be ideal for that.

I would go on at length about how it is to have a cool melody, and scan the spoken word a capella tracks for the right mood, and fail to find it. The world would be a happier place if
more collaborators posted 2 minute 30 second or so bits of workable words for morphing, adjusting, and, well, remixing. But I’ll go no longer than this obvious general statement.

I like CC as an expression of culture in real time, whether for a vlog, a podcast, a netlabel, or a home-made video. To me, the paradigm of “will it sell?” is less important than the paradigm of “does it spread that new culture?”