Nov 11 2007
Creative Commons and A Request to our Artists
As you may know, licensing music can be a complicated and annoying prospect, particularly for creative individuals who are more interested in creating than dealing with lawyers.
There are some directions in which I would like this site/podcast to go that raise some serious licensing and copyright issues. For instance, I would like to try to raise money for the podcast by putting out a “best of” or “Open Mic Scout Origionals” CD. Currently, this would involve getting in contact with every artist I want to include and negotiating a contract, which would get in the way of making the album in a timely manner, particularly when it comes to getting it out from Christmas.
On the other hand, I don’t want artists to just sell/give me all the rights to these recordings and songs. I’ve been looking for a solution that would give the Artists just as much flexibility as I have to use these recordings for their own purposes (including for commercial purposes.)
I would also like to offer all the songs in the podcast as singles on the website for artists and listeners to add to their collection.
To this end, from now on, I all the recordings I will be including in the podcast and on this website will be under the Creative Common’s license.
The particular License I’m using is called the “Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported” license.
Here is a quick summery of what this license allows:
- You are free to Share - to copy, distribute, and transmit the work.
- You are free to Remix - to adapt the work
Under the following conditions:
- You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
- If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.
- For any reuse or distributio, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
- An of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
- Nothing in this license impairs the author’s moral rights.
This license will apply to all recordings made after the date of November 11th, 2007.
However, I’m asking all the artists to consider putting the previous recordings under this license as well. It is optional, but you will greatly benefit from it. It will allow me to do use your work in ways that both supports this project and gives you LOTS of free publicity and tools for you.
Essentially all the time and energy I spend on promoting this project will result in higher public awareness of all of the artists featured on this site and will allow you to download all of the tracks individually from the podcast to use on your own sites and in your own albums. Even the “Open Mic Scout Originals” album will be available for artists to print their own copies to sell, with no need to pay us. Essentially, instead of paying royalties to the artists, the license just let the artists sell the album themselves without paying us a dime and vica versa.
I hope you all enjoy the new direction in which this project is going. I’ve always been a big fan of the open source and copyleft movement and its great to have yet another project working under that kind of license.
