Don says “the fate of content creation and distribution on the web will be bogged down by legal wrangling for years,” but it seems that George Lucas isn’t the only one thinking creatively about how to bring co-creation out of the grey zone.

Back in February YouTube added AudioSwap to it’s growing repertoire of “TestTube” innovations — a service that enables YouTubers to easily swap the “unlicensed” soundtracks to their video masterpieces for tracks that have been cleared with the copyright owners. As far as I can tell the exact terms of the deal that YouTube struck with the artists and labels are not public. YouTube has said that the artists who have agreed to license their tracks get attribution every time their song is used as a soundtrack, but I’m guessing there is some ad revenue in the mix as well.

It’s a great model and hopefully something we’ll see more of. For artists, it’s nice a compromise between making their music freely available under a Creative Commons license and the wholly impractical option of forcing individual mash-up makers to request permission from the labels every time they get the urge to be creative.

The collection of tracks on AudioSwap seems a little sparse at the moment. But perhaps one day soon humanity’s entire library of recorded music and video will be mashable because of services like this.