Steal This Song. Over the last year or so, the music industry has sued "4,679 alleged digital pirates," but next month, 16 artists will release a CD they hope will be freely copied, swapped, re-mixed and sampled by their fans, reports Ethan Smith in The Wall Street Journal. The CD is the brainchild of the editors of Wired magazine, and it will feature songs by artists including David Byrne, The Beastie Boys and Paul Westerberg. Called "Rip. Sample. Smash. Share.", the disc will be issued under a Creative Commons license, under which "some rights are reserved," which, in this case, "essentially represents a promise on the part of artists and their labels not to sue people for copying their music" (the Reveries Folk Den is published under Creative Commons, creativecommons.org, which was invented by Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University).

Wired, www.wired.com, embarked on the project just to see what happens when artists are allowed to spell out which rights are reserved or waived without involving their explicit permission (or lawyers). David Byrne, who is otherwise signed to Warner Brother's Nonesuch Records, says such file-sharing is not unlike book-sharing. "If you were a publisher," says David, "you didn't say, 'Oh no, Mr. Carnegie, don't go build those libraries -- it's going to destroy our business." In fact, two of the lesser-known artists on the CD -- Le Tigre and the Rapture -- hope the exposure will generate the kind of buzz they never would on radio, perhaps reaching tens of millions of music fans that might otherwise never hear their music.

Surprisingly, Hilary Rosen, a former ceo of the RIAA, says she's a fan of Creative Commons, although her comments about it suggests she's still conflicted: "... I don't think the major problem in the music business is that thousands of artists are looking for a legal and simplified method to give away their music." No, but at least 16 of them know a potent promotional idea when the see one: A total of "750,000 copies of the disc are to be distributed free with the magazine's November issue." The disc also will be handed out to audience members at a benefit concert" featuring David Byrne and others in NYC tomorrow night. If the experiment is a success, well, other artists just might start to give away some songs "to promote concerts and related merchandise, as well as to drive sales of CDs and digital tracks protected by standard copyright notice."

Steal This Base. The amazing rise of fantasy sports "is having a major effect on how we watch" the real thing, says Tim Wendel of Johns Hopkins University in an op-ed essay in USA Today. What started in 1979 at a Manhattan restaurant called La Rotisserie Francaise as "fantasy baseball", www.usastats.com, dreamed up by a fellow named Daniel Okrent, is today a $1.65 billion industry, attracting some 15 million players across America annually, each of whom spent an average of "$154 playing anything from fantasy Nascar to fantasy bass fishing." Fantasy football, as in the real world, is the most popular fantasy sport.

You probably know how this works -- fans get to assemble their own dream teams of star players, whose individual stats determine who wins or loses. How real-life teams fare is irrelevant. "That makes the games much more interesting," says Gayle Osterberg, "who participates in the Grand Old Football League on Capitol Hill. As Daniel Okrent explains, rotisserie -- or Roto, as it's casually called -- appeals to "anybody who believes that he or she can run the team better than the real people doing it. In our hearts, we're all general managers." Yes, and we're all rock stars, too.

However, Tim Wendel, author of a book called The New Face of Baseball, is not so sure this is a good thing. "Sports allegiances," he writes, "used to be passed from generation to generation. You often rooted for the hometown team or the one that your parents cheered for. You basked in the glory days and suffered through the losing seasons together." At the same time, he admits that the trend was started by the players themselves, who no longer "stay with the same team throughout an entire career ... Now, fans are following in their footsteps," notes Tim. He assigns the trend to "society's shift to individualize ... cellphone, iPod, fantasy league." Particuarly worth noting, he also observes that, "on the newsstands, publications about fantasy outnumbered the traditional previews about the upcoming season." Not to mention blogs.


Tim Manners, editor