Google Goes Open Source & CC for Radiohead’s ‘House of Cards’

Google is hosting open source and Creative Commons-licensed code for everyone to remix Radiohead’s latest video from In Rainbows, “House of Cards.”

“In Radiohead’s new video for ‘House of Cards,’ no cameras or lights were used. Instead, 3D plotting technologies collected information about the shapes and relative distances of objects,” according to the band’s YouTube channel.

After hearing about Radiohead’s first-of-its kind video, Google:

[A]greed with the band that it would be great to give you a deeper look into how all of this was done, and even a chance to play with the data yourself, under a license that allows remixing… You can view the video, watch a short documentary about how it was made, interact with the video in 3D, download some of the data, and download an iGoogle theme and gadget – all at http://code.google.com/radiohead.

Radiohead – ‘House of Cards’

Watch The Making of ‘House of Cards” below:

“[T]he data (although not the music) used to produce this music video are being made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License on the Google Code site,” according to Creative Commons board member Joi Ito. “This combination of Open Source licenses for code and Creative Commons licenses for data/content is very “good idea”…. Thanks to Aaron Koblin (the guy who wrote the code), Radiohead, Warner-Chappell and DeWitt Clinton and his team at Google for taking the lead on this.”

Also, In Rainbows is streaming for free at Last.Fm.

DISCLAIMER: I work for Warner/Chappell Music, Radiohead’s publisher