Creative Commons music downloads
 

In honor of Creative Commons, and to take them up on their offer of licensed free downloading, I have posted al 16 songs from the Creative Commons/Wired CD on my site:

http://www.karatemedia.com/music/commons

These songs are available on CD in the November issue of Wired, and include tracks from Beastie Boys, Danger Mouse, Paul Westerberg, Chuck D, and more. These artists have taken a stand and are allowing their music to be free for noncommercial sharing and sampling (and even commercial sampling, for many of them). Creative Commons will make these songs available for download on their site after Nov. 9.

Creative Commons has been discussed by some in the Business section of dvinfo.net; If you are unfamiliar with the Creative Commons licenses, here is you chance to download some cool mp3s and learn a little more about the new copyright options that are becoming available to artists. Links to CC and Wired on my site.

[and no, I'm not just doing this for attention. I like Lawrence Lessig and Creative Commons. Also, I'd like to see the 59GB of unused bandwidth I have every month go to some good use -- I feel so lame with all that unused bandwidth! :) ]

Do you know if this includes rights to use this in non-advertising film productions? It sounds like they're offering it only for sharing and including in your own music tracks as samples.

Ah, reading further into this, it seems using it in films isn't really addressed. Dern it - I could really use that Gilberto Gil track in something I'm working on now... Man I LOVE Brazilian music. Must be why I love Next Stop Wonderland so much. Blame it on the Bossa Nova...

I love Brazilian Jazz.
You could email the artists and ask for non commercial use in a short or feature. Happens a lot on the Festival circuit. Just make sure to offer a line in the credits. Free publicity for them, no cost for you. Let them know the music will be part of the feature, and not distributed seperately.

Well, with the Sampling licenses, using the song in a film isn't so much the point. But the artist may have their material covered under the other CC licenses, which allow for things like using a song in a noncommercial film (as described in the heartwarming tale at http://creativecommons.org/learn/licenses/how1)

Part of the point of Creative Commons is the idea of "some rights reserved" -- that is, you wouldn't have to contact the artist or his/her lawyer to get the rights to use the material in a particular way: if the artist wants you to be able to use their music in a film, then they can specifically state "Non-commercial" and "By Attribution" in the CC license. That's not to say that Gilberto Gil wouldn't let you use his music if you emailed him, but ideally, this sort of thing is explicitly stated in the CC license and you won't even have to bother the artist (although one might infer that if an artist with a CC license hasn't already made allowances for noncommercial film use, then they might not want you to do use it for such).

By the way, the article on Gilberto in Wired is great...