I had seen it coming and I had pictured right in my head. (See Special Feature:
"Bat N'Avò Goes To Hollywood: How To Be A Profitable Online Music Band
in The Age of Ethical Sharing and Collaboration")

Here it is, what I had originally envisioned come alive in front of my eyes as one other new great solution from the great guys at Creative Commons.

Inspired by world-famous musician and composer Gilberto Gil and developed with the help of the veteran found-art group Negativland, Creative Commons will launch our new Sampling Licenses on December 16, 2003.

The new licenses, which will encourage the creative transformation of existing works, will kick-off in Brazil — home of Gil, who now serves as the nation's Minister of Culture, and the FGV Law School, which coordinates Creative Commons' activities in Brazil. Gil and FGV Law School will collaborate on a release of the first Sampling-licensed creative works, which will then serve as the model for the adoption of the Sampling licenses around the world.

The Sampling licenses will help authors foster a broad range of culture, from photo collage to musical "mash-ups," that the law currently deems illegitimate -- despite its growing popularity and acceptance online.

And while embodying the Creative Commons "Some Rights Reserved" model of copyright, the licenses will offer a combination of conditions and freedoms that our current licenses do not.

The Sampling License

The Sampling license will let authors invite others to tranform their work, even for commercial purposes, while prohibiting distribution of verbatim copies, or any use in advertising.

For example, an artist could take a photo licensed under Sampling, crop it, and use it in a commercial collage, but she could not distribute simple copies of the whole, original photo.

A DJ could borrow elements of a licensed song, royalty-free, and use them in an original piece. He could not, however, put a copy of the tune on a file-sharing network.

The Sampling-Plus License

The Sampling-Plus license will offer the same freedoms as the Sampling license, but will also allow noncommercial sharing of the verbatim work.

So, an artist could release her song under a Sampling-Plus license to encourage her fans to trade it on file-sharing networks, then remix or build upon it however they like. But the license would protect verbatim copies of her work from for-profit exploitation by others.

Or a photographer could invite the widespread, noncommercial distribution of a whole photo and its resulting tranformation while preventing others from simply reselling the photo, unchanged.

For more information on the Sampling Licenses, check the Creative Commons page at: http://www.creativecommons.org/