Yahoo Opens Portal to Creative Commons Content By George Ziemann (12 Apr. 2005) Frank Ehrens at the Washington Post is reporting today that the recording industry's effort to sue music pirates into submission is reaching into the next generation of the Internet with the filing of 405 lawsuits tomorrow against college students using a faster version of the Web called Internet2, a supposedly private network created by universities and colleges for sharing research and other academic works. To date, the RIAA has sued more than 9,000 file-sharers. "This is an emerging epidemic," RIAA president Cary Sherman said today. "We cannot allow a zone of lawlessness where the normal rules do not apply." Oh, it's an epidemic, all right. An epidemic of gross stupidity, both on the part of the record companies, who claim the moral high ground even though they stole the music in the first place, are suing the dwindling percentage of people who will still listen to it; and the public, which by now has no good reason not to be perfectly aware of the consequences of possessing RIAA music. They all know better, but they don't care. Stuck somewhere in the middle have been the responsible listeners, who have tried to avoid the RIAA's "illegal" music and the lawsuits that come with them. But this group has always faced the question of how to tell the difference. At the same time, the RIAA is asking all of the p2p groups to screen out their music, even though they had no choice to admit there was no readily available way to immediately discern between one of their songs and a ditty by an astronomy professor named Usher. Now you can. Of all the competing methods for artists to offer authorized music for sharing, Creative Commons has emerged as the standard. Embedding metadata tags helps p2p networks identify it, but if you want to avoid p2p altogether, Yahoo now offers a specialized search for Creative Commons files. While this includes a ton of Indie music, it also contains thousands of authorized bootlegs of live performances by major acts. The RIAA does not own the sound recording copyrights for these bootlegs. Free, legal, guilt-free music from the true moral high ground -- artists more dedicated to the music than the money. In essence, Yahoo, Creative Commons and the Internet Archive have screened out the RIAA, something Kazaa and Grokster (or the RIAA, for that matter) can't quite seem to figure out how to do. Theoretically, this should be a tipping point for the "music wars," an event that people will look back in retrospect and say, "...that changed everything." Now there's no excuse. You can tell the difference. So could Kazaa and Grokster if they wanted to. Search results that do not include RIAA music. A lawless zone where the normal rules do not apply. What's not to like? It could become an epidemic.