MusicRadar

The Creative Commons logo is starting to become a common sight.

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Most people have at least a vague idea of what copyright law is, but as we all know, that doesn't mean that the majority of people respect it. Anyone who downloads a piece of copyright music from the internet is breaking the law, but the practice is rife nonetheless. And do you always think through the copyright implications of sampling commercial tracks?

While some might argue that the upshot of all this is that copyright laws should be more brutally enforced, others see said laws as archaic and unenforceable. Perhaps, then, we need to find a different solution, and one such option is Creative Commons licensing.

Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation based in San Francisco that, since 2001, has been working to make it easier "for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright". That last part is important: CC-licensed works aren't 'free'; it's just that their authors don't have 'all rights reserved'. Instead, they choose to reserve some of their rights.

Six of the best

There are six main CC licences, and as a content author (a musician, for example), you choose the one that reflects what you want others to be able to do with your work. At the most relaxed end of the scale, there's Attribution, which lets others "distribute, remix, tweak and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation".

The most restrictive is Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives, which allows others to "download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can't change them in any way or use them commercially". The licences in between offer variations on these two extremes - details are at creativecommons.org/about/licenses.

Peter Kirn, who runs the Create Digital Music blog and is a keen advocate of CC, believes that it's a good fit for those who plan to distribute their music via the internet. "In the web age, there are many instances when your primary goal is really to share. You upload your work with the hopes that it'll get widely distributed or remixed, and you don't necessarily want people to ask permission," he says.

"The licence here is a tool for making that explicit. It doesn't mean that music has 'less value' - to me, it's about music for which the greatest value to use is sharing broadly."

Chris Randall (of Audio Damage fame) was one of the first artists to commercially release a CC-licensed album - he says he was looking for a licence that enabled him to "unambiguously allow consumers to sample and share my work, while still keeping in place the legalities necessary to ensure I got paid for the commercial uses of my songs," - but he isn't quite the CC evangelist you might expect.

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