When I first thought about intellectual property I started to think back on a documentary I had watched last year on music sampling. In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or a sound recording in a different song or piece. In this manner, artists are able to build off of each other’s works. The original artist gets a certain royalty from the use of their old track and sampling often enables their old song to gain new exposure. As I became more interested in this topic I started to research Creative Commons Licenses. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that offers free legal tools to protect the use of creative work while maximizing the amount of material that is available for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing (Creative Commons 2010). It is interesting to consider Creative Commons Licenses as an “alternative history” to copyright laws.