Trent Reznor just showed everyone how way cooler than Radiohead he is by releasing Ghosts I-IV, a 4-CD set of new instrumental music under a Creative Commons license. The music is available in a bunch of DRM-FREE formats—including FLAC lossless. Earlier today, Ghosts I was posted—not leaked, posted—to The Pirate Bay. NIN would of course appreciate it if you buy the albums from the official site for $5, but seeing as the store is swamped at the moment, you can just get it from, you know, anywhere else on the Internet while you wait for the store traffic to ease up.

NIN’s been leaning this way—towards supporting free culture and a sensible copyright scheme—for a while now, but this is a sign of explicit support for CC and Free Culture. From the Ghosts FAQ: “An exciting partnership and experience regarding this release will be announced soon.” Whatever that means, I feel like Lessig is involved.

(Via Dracko on Whitechapel)

Haven’t been paying much attention to the Internet in the past few days, and thus forgot about the release of the new, free NIN album, The Slip, even though it was (sort of) announced in the ID3 on the free track Trent released recently.