Amateur musicians of the digital age probably know more about remixing and recreating content than anyone else. We know that taking samples of culture and giving them a new context, rearranging them in different ways does create new forms of art.
None of us get paid for it and yet the current stranglehold of copyright law would deem us criminals for consuming and creating culture. This inflexibility leads many of us to the extreme position that all copyright law be damned, I’ll pirate whatever I want.
There is another way, to find a balance where content creators such as ourselves are empowered by the law not criminalized by it.
In this video Stanford Law professor and founder of Creative Commons Larry Lessig talks about the law vs. creativity. (It’s a 20 minutes TED talk).
In this video Lessig talks about his book, “Free Culture” and the whole enterprise of making copyright law fair.
As content creators think about freeing your own contributions to culture. Allow your audience the pleasure of not only listening to your work but remixing it. If their remix turns out to be a hit you can go on negotiate a fair settlement of royalties.
As we expand a commons, an arena of free culture the copyright holders are forced to compete with a medium that offers their audience more.
Imagine if the works of Shakespeare were still own and monopolized by a single publishing company. Or Mozart or Beethoven…
By default all your works are fully copyright as soon as you make them. Just indicate otherwise by choosing which Creative Commons copyright you wish to use and add a link.
If you still don’t know what Creative Commons is, This video explains it all.
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We want to spread the word about free remixes… by spreading the funk.
It is legal to download, sample and share all the music found on this website. We hand pick every remix, and like to think that our catalog represents the best in funky and free music. We dig quality, not just quantity.
Another website using the power of creative commons to spread free legal music and highlight remixes of some great tracks.
In an age where backroom deals and cash spread all over the place gets A grade filth clogging the airwaves and mega-corps suing their own customers. Why not listen to real music by people who really make it?
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So here’s how Creative Commons works:
Goto:
http://creativecommons.org/license/
and select your license. Mine is thise one:
Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported
This means you are free to download my music give it to your friends whatever, and you can remix and make derivative works, but cannot use those works for commerical purposes, in other words profit from those works.
So if someone makes it big with a remix of one of your tracks, you can waive the restrictions and negotiate a new agreement for commercial use.
A similar licence is the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported which is exactly the same except:
“Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.”
I think this spirit is at the core of the maketunes community, it would be a good idea to integrate the music upload proccess with the ability to choose a CC license. And it should probably be restricted to at least Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported, which means it’s legal to download and share the music.
There are also sampling licenses:
http://creativecommons.org/about/sampling
http://creativecommons.org/about/sampling-movie
But you only have to worry about using these if you are already selling your music.
The people at CC are all about explaining stuff in simple terms, here is a great page to understand it all:
http://creativecommons.org/learnmore/
I especially recommend the videos:
http://support.creativecommons.org/videos
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