Some time ago I had the opportunity to meet John Buckman and "Mrs Buckman" Jan as they visited in Helsinki. John gave a talk about his Magnatune business and Creative Commons in the Aula forum. Unfortunately, the video is not yet available online, but let's hope it gets here eventually.

BookMooch

A big part of John's talk was about BookMooch a new Web 2.0 venture he has recently launched. The idea with BookMooch is that you can list all of the books you have lying at home but will never read again. (If you are like me, you'll only read a book once anyway.) Then someone who wants to read that book can order it... OOPS SORRY: mooch it from you, which means you will mail it to them. Free of charge, no money involved. Similarly, after you have first sent out some books, you will yourself get BookMooch points that you can use to mooch books from others.

So, as I happen to have these books lying around at home, I thought, this is a nice ting to do, share some of them with others. So I decided to offer one out on BookMooch.com. I'll sign it before I send it to you too.

Unfortunately, it seems I can only put out one copy of the same book, so there you go. Who's the fastest will get it.

The Creative Commons record labels

The Finnish readers of my blog will remember that I've also met another Creative Commons musician/businessman, Neil Leyton. (In fact, I recognize that photo by Lilli Kinnunen to be from a bar in Helsinki :-)

Since we also had time to share a nice dinner with John and Jan and some other Finnish Creative Commons and EFFI activists, it was interesting to compare the similarities and differences with these two - as I believe - most prominent Creative Commons record labels. John seems to be very businessmanlike, very knowledgeable of Open Source and can easily discuss the arguments against the NoDerivatives license and how he's choice of CC license compares with the GPL. Neil on the other - while he has by necessity met a lot of Open Source people and cannot help that - is first and foremost a rock musician. Of course, as owner of a record label he has to be the business man too, but even then he is the musician/businessman. And don't get me wrong, Neil knows the intricacies of Copyright legislation, collecting societies and whatever. Talk to him if you meet him, you'll be amazed.

Both had a very similar background in their decision to go with Open Music and in my understanding both had more or less figured out by themselves what they wanted to do before they got in though with Creative Commons. Both had had a bad experience with an established record label which was the catalyst for the decision. Neil has a nice story about Napster to tell: It is his theory that Napster increased - not decreased - record sales. But it increased sales of independent artists, to the loss of the "big four" record labels. "I have friends who had sold like 50 or 200 records. But when people found their songs on Napster, suddenly they were selling 200, 500 or 2000 records!" So an intelligent guy like Neil easily figured out the logical next step then...

Video with Neil and me

Talking about videos, the video of Neil in Helsinki in a Creative Commons seminar actually is available online. There is a video of my talk in the seminar too. (With a bold 10-year prediction!)