Back in 2005, a group of American online rights activists and scholars – one of whom was Lawrence Lessig, founder of the Creative Commons non-profit – sat down with Gilberto Gil in a living room in Rio de Janeiro. 

Gil was one of the key figures of Brazil’s tropicália movement. Musically, tropicália was an amalgamation of Brazilian styles like samba and bossa nova with the avant garde – as well as imports, like American psychedelia and pop rock.

At the time, Gil was also Brazil’s presiding Minister of Culture, and he approached the digital world through a similarly pluralistic lens. He spoke about how “the fundamentalists of absolute property control” were standing in the way of the digital world's promises of cultural democracy.

"A world opened up by communications cannot remain closed up in a feudal vision of property," he said. "No country – not the U.S., not Europe – can stand in the way of it. It's a global trend. It's part of the very process of civilization. It's the semantic abundance of the modern world – and there's no use resisting it."

Last June, I connected with several members of CC0lab, a spin-off of the on-chain songwriting project Songcamp whose headless band of 70-plus artists embody a similar brand of creative cross-pollination. Twenty musicians, developers and visual artists from Songcamp’s third songwriting camp formed CC0lab. The group’s creators use CC0 (the most liberal Creative Commons license) to waive all copyright and related rights – to add them, so to speak, to “the semantic abundance of the modern world.” 

I caught up recently with longtime CC0lab captain, Steph Essiambre. After a year away from crypto – and a debilitating personal hack – she’s returned to host another CC0lab minicamp. I participated in this one, collaborating with her co-steward – the artist, Celia Inside. Although a smaller affair, this round was no less demonstrative of that post-”feudal vision of property,” and of the collective potential of a world that stops resisting it.

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Essiambre – who makes music under the moniker Dontmesswithjaun – lives in a village between Montreal and Quebec City, working as a video editor. She was introduced to CC0 through her father, who was one of the first musicians on Premium Beat – a royalty-free music library eventually acquired by Shutterstock. Later, with a coworker, she built her own royalty-free media bank, and continued to explore Creative Commons licensing.

Developed in 2001 by Lessig, Hal Abelson and Eric Eldred, Creative Commons introduced a series of licenses that carved a middle ground between the extremes of strict copyright and public domain – because, by themselves, the extremes weren’t working.

On one side, “all rights reserved” copyright protected the economic interests of rightsholders, but access to information was walled off. On the other, piracy and illegal downloading eased access to that information, but failed to direct economic value back to creators.

Credit: Shamanic

Creative Commons licenses were developed in response to these limitations. Varying attribution requirements across licenses allow creators to customize the distribution of their works. Ultimately, the goal was to strike a balance between protecting creators' rights and encouraging the spread of knowledge and creativity. 

The blockchain was built in that same spirit, oriented toward the decentralization and democratization of information. The music industry, though, was built atop traditional “all rights reserved” copyright, which means the potential reach of that art is inhibited, and that decentralized formats like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) don't fit neatly into its scaffolding. 

Conceptually, CC0 and blockchain are a match made in heaven. NFTs can track the usage of Creative Commons-licensed content and automatically distribute royalties to creators. The art moves with ease, and value accrues via the art’s cultural impact. 

Essiambre first became aware of that synergy in 2021. Through her work, she met the web3 fashion artist Emma-Jane, who was deeply invested in CC0 and armed with what Essiambre described as a “world vision of free art.” 

Inspired, Essiambre began exploring CC0’s music applications, joining Songcamp and later spinning out CC0Lab with the music artist Michael Onabolu. Together they spearheaded the first minicamp. On November 6, 2023, I attended the Songcamp heartbeat call that served as a listening party for the first CC0lab mixtape.

By releasing the project on-chain (via Zora), the collective was able to empower the memetic behavior that naturally occurs online and track the value back to the original creator(s). 

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During the minicamp, though, Essiambre was hacked. It began with her personal wallet, then spread to CC0 – the first CC0lab 1:1 NFTs were stolen – then to Twitter and Instagram. She lost much of her digital identity. The first time the real Essiambre ever messaged me was on Discord, warning me about the fake Essiambre that was messaging me on Twitter. 

It was a devastating climb back. She took a crypto sabbatical, but it wasn’t a “conscious decision,” she told me, “but more a slow unconscious falling apart in all aspects of my life as I was trying to stay strong.” 

When she returned, it felt quiet. “It seems there are not as many music community happenings,” she observed, which motivated her to gather people and coordinate another minicamp. “So to get the team together, it happened more in DMs,” she said.

Aware of my own predilection for the blockchain-CC0 handshake, she invited me to participate. I joined about a dozen other artists. We were all tasked with bringing “a handmade sample (voice, instruments, processed recordings, etc.)” to drop into the collective’s Discord chat. Other participants could then use them – or anything from the lab’s growing CC0 sample bank – to build a song.

When I offered to lend my voice, Celia Inside sent me a note. Celia – who chose not to share her last name – is a singer, songwriter and producer, as well as the founder of the independent music blog, iridescent wave. Her website is grounded in the phrase: “What is the point of any of this if we’re not bringing people together?”

Celia sent me an instrumental track called “Reach.” The song features a looping guitar riff with a handful of percussive elements. I’m a solo singer-songwriter, so engaging with a musical foundation I didn’t build was challenging. In time, though, I found freedom in the detachment. I could be more playful and less precious, and the vocal part – which features both sung lyrics and spoken word – reflected that. It’s markedly different from my other music (and from Celia’s original version). 

We sent it off to Conor Dalton, an audio engineer who mastered all eight of the minicamp’s tracks. Lucas Nicoll – aka the artist Shamanic – contributed visuals. And Kevin Neaton provided engineering support, uploading the tracks to both the website and to Arweave, a decentralized server where each song is applied with a “CC0” tag.

After the holidays, the music will be released as a mixtape, as individual songs on the new Songcamp app, Audiato and potentially as 1:1 NFTs on Manifold. Revenue will be split between creators (80%) and the CC0 treasury (20%). And in perpetuity, CC0 will ensure anyone can use these songs – or their stems (the modules of a song, like the individual vocal track).

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On December 23, CC0lab had a private listening party in Discord. While the music played, a colorful visualizer displayed a spinning cassette tape – another Nicoll contribution. The mixtape itself was a melange of sound and style, from glitchy darkness to tender lyricism.

Over the half hour of listening, there was a gush of support and encouragement. The chat was filled with fire emojis and gratitude. No CC0lab minicamp, no opportunity to collaborate with this other artist – and people recognized that. A core function of CC0lab is indeed “bringing people together,” and, as Essiambre said, “to build a bank of music stems we and the world can play with.”

In other words: to celebrate the semantic abundance of our world. It’s the tropicália path – the syncretic flourish of psychedelia meets samba. In fact, as Minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil borrowed that name to describe his approach: “to tropicalize” the digital world. 

In that embrace of a world vision of free art, though, we’ll need to conceive new ways of capturing value. “We are living in this window of time where we are trying to use new tools to make things better,” Essiambre said, “but it's all still the wild unknown – evolution takes so much time and people exploring and failing.”

When she was hacked, she was inundated with “thoughts about CC0 and how ridiculous it is that our ‘provenance’ NFTs – our 1:1s – were stolen,” she said, wondering, “so why are we doing this and putting so much effort?”

She answered the question herself: because “music and experience is all we got.” And if that’s all we’ve got, let’s make it fucking brilliant. Let’s meet one another halfway until the sum is greater than all the parts. Let’s, as Gil said, “make the digital world join in the samba.”

lead image credit: Shamanic