Releasing Work under a Creative Commons License

Many artists are beginning to release music and other works directly into the Creative Commons. This is being done, partly, as a way to give back to their fans, which is more than welcome after the messiness and ethical ambiguity of the whole Napster/Bearshare/Pirate’s Bay/RIAA fiasco. Between rampant, unfocused lawsuits, and rampant pirating, it’s kind of hard for many music downloaders to know what is and isn’t legal anymore.

What a creative commons licensing scheme does is allow for an author to grant either some, or all, of their rights as copyright holder to the general public. This means that anyone who owns a copy of, say, Trent Reznor’s latest album, which was released under creative commons, may alter and re-release that album in whatever way they wish.

However, it also means that absolutely nobody can actually charge money for the distribution of that work. Anyone who receives a work protected by Creative Commons is allowed to modify, distribute, copy, or re-release the work as they see fit, but they may not put it towards any financial ends.

The Creative Commons license has been pretty popular for some time in internet based musicians communities, now. By swapping compositions back and forth for free and allowing remixing and so on, this encourages a share-and-share-alike mindset amongst the boards and chatrooms, and this can be very conducive to the creative process, with people freely trading ideas without fear of being sued.

However, the Creative Commons license has been misinterpreted by a number of mainstream musicians. Most notably would be the hip hop producer Timbaland. Believing ‘Creative Commons’ to mean ‘free’, Timbaland, for a period of time, made a habit of sampling Creative Commons music from the internet so as to create new beats.

The problem isn’t that he did the remixes, but rather, that he released those remixes for commercial reasons. Normally, artists who are sampled without authorization are content to simply collect a royalty check and an apology letter. The real problem here is that the artists that Timbaland was sampling never wanted money to be an issue with their music. They created the music solely for the purpose of sharing, and the idea of taking that music and selling it simply does not sit well with them.

Creative commons is similar to open content, open source, copylefting, and shareware, in that copyright laws are used to protect the share and share alike ethos of the original creator of the content. Creative commons is not to be confused with free content and the public domain. Free content means that the content is simply not protected by copyright laws in any way whatsoever, and so, falls into the public domain. Content within the public domain has absolutely no restrictions placed on what you can do with the content, or whether or not you can charge money for the content.

So for example, a lot of old blues music is in the public domain. This means that, if you were so inclined, you could take your favourite old blues songs and compile them onto a CD, and then sell that CD for whatever price you think is fair. Because there are no owners to public domain or free content, there are no restrictions on selling it.

However, someone could also buy that CD from you, burn their own copies, and then sell those at whatever price they think is fair. Because, legally, the content does not specifically belong to you, you just have the right to sell it.

By contrast, creative commons, shareware, open content, etcetera, is actually protected against anyone actually selling the content. The content is only free as long as it remains free, and any derivatives or distributions of open content have to be issued with the same copyleft license as the original source version was.

So in other words, creative commons music is not copyright free. It is very much copyright protected, it’s just that, unlike with commercially released copyright protected music, the copyright applied to creative commons music specifies that the content must never be charged money for, under any circumstance.

The upside for artists is that, while they may not be making money on their music, they are being heard much more easily than if they decided to charge money or go through a music production company, and to many, that’s all that really matters in the long run.

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Creative Commons is a post from: US Intellectual Property Law