Obvious Diversion

Creative Commons is teaming up with Wired Magazine to distribute tracks from sixteen artists, including the Beastie Boys and Paul Westerberg, under a Creative Commons license that allows for sharing and sampling. This is a fantastic idea and will help raise awareness of Creative Commons licenses. The licenses are a fantastically empowering tool and it’s great to see the coverage.

How are they going to distribute these tracks? From the MSNBC article:

Approximately 750,000 copies of “The Wired CD: Rip. Sample. Mash. Share.” are set to arrive on newsstands and in subscribers’ mailboxes along with Wired magazine’s November issue.

A CD? With all of the great ways to distribute the tracks online, why in the world would you only distribute the tracks on a limited number of CDs? I searched around for an official online source for these tracks and came up empty handed. I realize Wired wants to sell magazines, but they seem comfortable with distributing their print articles via their website. Perhaps the CD distribution is a condition of the labels, but with a license they permits rights to resample and redistribute? It’s a strange choice in an otherwise cool initiative.