I'm starting to think that remix culture has been essentially stifled by licensing. Artists like Steinski, Danger Mouse, and Girl Talk have gained notoriety exclusively through word of mouth. Copyright and licensing prevent them from monetizing their music, so they are forced to promote and release it in other ways, either quick pressed vinyl or free internet distribution. In a remix culture, I'm hesitant to describe anything as "pre-final", or, perhaps we should label everything as "pre-final".

I think a public domain or creative commons music community could develop a thriving remix community in unique ways. Remixes can be recontextualized as forks of music. I would imagine that fingerprinting could be used really effectively here, which will require some thought. As a recording artist, it would be really useful for me to be able to delete takes but retain them in version history. The music industry is filled with stories of the person who owns the recording studio retaining the masters to a session, and then refusing to cooperate with the artist. Opening that data up would be a massive boon not only to musicians but I think to recording studios as well, as the finer aspects of a recording session become much easier to access.

There's a deeper problem, though. There's a dichotomy between the binary blobs that DAWs use and the user-readable stem files that artists like Radiohead release. It's as though all the information about the studio session and all the non-temporal aspects of editing are obfuscated by assembly code. Ideally, it would be nice to replace the binary blobs that programs like Audacity and Ardour save to with human-readable stems that encode sound or video editing in metadata. Ultimately I think this is a critical UI requirement, but for now I think the best solution is to use git-annex to store .flacs and .oggs, as well as both individual exported stem files and binary project blobs. In the final analysis, different DAWs are really more like different instruments, and cross compatibility between instruments is a requirement.

Uploading files to a server is pretty easy, but what is a little more challenging is automatically licensing the content, uploading to your server, creating a torrent that uses the server as a webseed, and then publishing it to a tracker. This publishing flow would let me directly publish content even on my puny little shared web hosting account. Traffic load is automatically distributed through bittorrent, and censorship becomes much more difficult (albiet not impossible.) From there, I think, it would be fairly trivial to build a front-end to replace an interface like YouTube's "Submit Video" page.

Treating copyrighted content like viruses is a feature I would really like to see more of. While I'm a firm supporter of PopcornTime/Time4Popcorn/AsPopcornGoesBy, I don't really want to use it. I'd rather find public domain things to watch than Hollywood Movies or TV shows. I wish PopcornTime had a public domain feature.

If there are trackers that only use public domain or Creative Commons content, nobody has invited me to them. ;) I think it wouldn't be too hard to make a tracker that scanned for a machine readable public domain or CC license, but I don't have much experience with torrent trackers. I'd like to try and set one up soon, I think initially you could just moderate content. I'm kind of baffled by the direction Bittorrent, Inc. has taken, because they could just as easily be advocating for number of seeds as a surveillance-free fanbase metric, rather than just releasing DRM'd music through Bittorrent.

Huginn looks really, really interesting. I sure appreciate your posts. Thanks very much.