Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

So, it's Christmas today (or it will be tomorrow, depending on where you live). Wouldn't it be nice if you had a bunch of freely and legally available Christmas songs you could listen to all day? Burn on CDs and hand over to your relatives? Share with your friends without the fear of being sued to death by big record labels?

Well, here's a list of 110 256 songs which are all explicitly released under a Creative Commons license (no, I did not consider songs which are merely "podsafe"!) and thus can be shared, listened to, and sometimes even modified freely. There's a great variety in style, mood, and genre of the songs: some traditional, some contemporary, some happy, some sad, and some just plain funny. So here's the list:

Single MP3s:

• Natalie Brown - Jingle Bells
• Danny Morris - Santa's Gone Surfing! — no longer available
• Bullette - Christmas Blank
• Bullette - The Finest Gifts
• Jonathan Coulton - Podsafe Christmas Song
• Jonathan Coulton - Christmas Is Interesting — no longer available
• Pete Green - Everything's Dead Pretty When it Snows
• Robert Gayler - Christmas Bells
• Sonny Jim - Christmas
• Shira Kammen - Christmas Day in the Morning
• Derek K. Miller - We Three Kings
• High-C & DJ Manticore - How George Stole Christmas
• Sarah Whiteley - Still, Still, Still
• Sean McGaughey - Homeless Babe
• Skoria - Christmas Impro — updated link

Compilations:

• Kemper Crabb - A Medieval Christmas (11 songs) — no longer available
• Diorisiy - Christmas Carols (19 songs)
• The 8bitpeoples - The 8bits of Christmas (8 songs)
• Austin Rudy Christmas - Carolina Christmas (5 songs)
• Goyette Christmas Carolers - Various Christmas Songs (10 songs)
• Kevin MacLeod - Holiday / Christmas Collection (13 songs)
• Oilville Christmas Dynasty - Christmas Compilations (39 songs) — updated link
• Ottmar Liebert - Winter Rose (13 songs) — no longer free, it seems

Additional songs 2006:

• Jonathan Coulton - Chiron Beta Prime (1 song)
• Naomi & Shamine King - Christmas with the Swirrels (11 songs)
• Naomi & Shamine King - Duets 2004 "Star Zero" (18 Christmas-related songs)
• Happy Puppy Records - A Happy Puppy Christmas (4 songs)
• Hairy Larry - The Gift (9 songs)
• Anup - Jingle Bells (1 song)
• The Kyiv Theological Academy And Seminary Choir - Hymns of the All-Night Vigil (20 songs)
• Drevo - Christian Themes in Ukrainian Folk Songs (22 songs)
• Uncle Seth - To Be An Angel (1 song) — updated link
• Die Weihnachtshasser - Gemeines zur Weihnachtszeit (14 songs)
• Die drei Lenöre - Der Weihnachtsmann / Rasierschaum (5 songs)
• Jeff Taylor keeps another list of free Christmas-related music at freechristmasmusic.googlepages.com (but not all of it is Creative Commons licensed!).
• Some more Christmas music will probably appear in my podcast over the next few days, too...

Additional songs 2008:

• Allison Crowe - Tidings (traditional songs) (6 songs)
• Skoria - Quimsa XMAS (1 song)
• the glimmer room - Christmas In Jonestown (1 song)
• Derek K. Miller - What Child Is This / Greensleeves (1 song)
• John Stebbe - Silent Night (Jazz Trio Version) (1 song)
• Ralph Rousseau Meulenbroeks - Christmas Carols (16 songs)
• Mystified - While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night (1 song)
• Seaview Full Gospel Church - Living Christmas Tree 2004 (16 songs)

This list is by no means complete, I'm sure. So if you happen to know some more Creative Commons licensed Christmas music, please leave a comment! I'd love to hear about it.

(Btw., the nice image on the right is taken from the Wikipedia. The author is Malene Thyssen, and the image is dual-licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.2 and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license)

Merry Christmas everyone!

Update 2008-12-21: Added more songs for 2008. Updated/marked broken links.
Update 2006-12-22: Added more songs for 2006 :)
Update 2005-12-26: Added "Homeless Babe". Added "Christmas Impro".
Update 2005-12-25: In the press: Boing Boing, Creative Commons Blog, netzpolitik.org, Technorati, digg.com, del.icio.us and lots more. Added "How George Stole Christmas". Added "Winter Rose". Added "Still, Still, Still".
Update 2005-12-24: Added "We Three Kings".

Yes, I finally got a (free) flickr account and uploaded some of my favorite photos from my photoblog to my flickr page.

This has several reasons:

• Increased exposure to the public + I hope for many ratings and comments from other flickr users.
• I wanted to get a flickr account anyways in order to be able to comment on other people's photos.
• As my photos are Creative Commons licensed they can be "remixed". See the flickr remix group for some nice examples. I'll probably create some remixes of other people's photos, too.

Note: My photoblog will not die, I will continue posting new stuff there. I'll just use the flickr page for some selected shots.

There's an RSS feed for the flickr page, if you want track my photos.

Note: This is actually an entry for my music podcast, but I'm cross-posting this to my blog as well, as I think it deserves a broader exposure!

Now, here is a really special song I'd like you to listen to. This is a great song (aria!) by Improbulus which is about the Creative Commons movement. The song itself is Creative Commons licensed, of course, as well as the lyrics (the "libretto" is you want).

Quoting from the original site, the song is an

Operatic ode to Creative Commons, to the tune of Puccini's O Mio Babbino Caro!

The lyrics:

This is Creative Commons:
Something that you've created
Somebody else can copy
Spreading the word about you
You see, they're free to copy
But they must give you credit
And others then can copy
Giving you credit anew
And if they make some money so must you - you profit too!
Isn't that fair, and how?
So get Creative now...

It's a wonderful promotional song for Creative Commons, and it sure has the potential to become sort of the hymn of the Creative Commons movement/culture, if you ask me.

(found via consumingexperience.blogspot.com)

Update 2005-12-06: The song was taken down for now, as the legal situation of the background music is unclear.

Song: Improbulus - Creative Commons Song (2:33 min, 2.4 MB)
License: CC-by-nc-sa 2.5
Source: archive.org

OMG! I would have never believed this if I hadn't seen the videos with my own eyes: Richard M. Stallman of GNU and Free Software fame singing various songs, and Gilberto Gil, famous musician and currently Brazil's minister of culture, jamming on his guitar. Unbelievable.

(via Boing Boing and netzpolitik.org )

I didn't follow this disaster too closely, but here's a short (most probably incomplete) roundup of what happened so far:

1. The Sony DRM installs a rootkit,
2. people use the rootkit to make game cheats safe from the (Blizzard) Warden,
3. trojans start (ab)using the DRM rootkit,
4. Sony gets sued,
5. Sony pulls the rootkit.

Nice bedtime story so far. Now it turns out that Sony’s web-based XCP (rootkit) uninstaller seems to open huge, gaping security holes itself...

Not that I would care too much, I don't buy any Sony CDs. There's a huge pile of great Creative Commons licensed music out there (shameless plug: check my music podcast for some hand-selected goodies). No need to pay huge corporations for crappy music which comes with funny "extras"...