Engineer/producer Eddie Kramer created an immortal recording legacy in the '60s and '70s, working behind the board on classic records by Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Small Faces, Peter Frampton, Traffic, Mott the Hoople, David Bowie and many others. Now, Kramer is making a portion of his extensive photo archives available to the public for the first time. Working with his Manhattan-based representative, Peter Cavanaugh, Kramer has had hundreds of his best photos digitally scanned (at 8,000 dpi!) and converted to archival-quality prints. Kramer said, “It's taken us a couple of years to put all of these things together, but they've come out really beautifully.” Kramer's work runs the gamut from casual studio shots to beautiful live concert photography — most of it never seen before.

“I knew nothing about photography when I started shooting around Olympic [Studios, London]. There were always tremendous subjects floating in and out of studios. I kept the camera next to me [at the board] and I would take pictures in between takes or in breaks. My favorite trick was to have it all prepped and to swing 'round in chair, if the artist was sitting on the couch behind me, snap a few shots and then get back to work.”

The panels and individual photos can be viewed (and purchased) on the Web at www.aria photos.com.
— Blair Jackson

Nonprofit organization Creative Commons has released its first product: Version 1.0 of its free machine-readable copyright licenses. These licenses allow copyright holders to easily inform others that their works are free to copy and used for specific purposes — thus taking the control back to the holder; i.e., copyright holders can choose to waive all of their rights (“No Rights Reserved”) or some of them (“Some Rights Reserved”). Once a license is selected, it will appear in three different formats: commons deed, a plain-language summary of the license; legal code, the fine print; and digital code, machine-readable translation for search engines and other apps.

“Our model was inspired in large part by the open-source and free software movements,” said Creative Commons executive director Glenn Otis Brown. “The beauty of their approach is that they're based on copyright owners' consent — independent of any legislative action — and motivated out of a wonderful mixture of self-interest and community spirit. If you're clever about how you leverage your rights, you can cash in on openness. Sharing, done properly, is both smart and right.”

Choose a license for your MP3 at http://creativecommons.org/license/.