LinuxMusicians

I'm curious: Do any of you release your music under a creative commons license? If so, which one(s) and why?

yes I do. I'm not sure which one it is. It's the least restrictive one I believe. I do it partly because I want no responsibility for what happens to my music once released. Also I don't want to place any roadblocks in front of anyone who might want to listen to it or use it in some way.

I'm with aprzekaz. Anyone can download your music if they can hear anyway. At least give a backlink and proper credit to where you got it.

Yes, I use http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ for all my new music. All my older songs that are registered with the Dutch copyright registration (BUMA) have a https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ license, the commercial part is being taken care of by BUMA.

Same here - attribution, share-alike

I use CC-BY-SA 4.0 because it is a strong copyleft license and people will not be able to use my music in proprietary works. It is very important.

i'm planning to release my recordings in lossy formats under some CC license.
(lossless formats with better mastering are going to be for sale.)

later i probably will also release some cool synth presets under CC, but at the moment i'm willing to keep them proprietary for some time (until i feel i've used them myself long enough), because everyone wants to download more and more presets for free, but very few people are willing to spend their time to educate and make their own — and i strongly dislike that.

chaocrator wrote:everyone wants to download more and more presets for free, but very few people are willing to spend their time to educate and make their own — and i strongly dislike that.

What got you into creating and sharing softsynth presets and for what DAW's and VST's? Hope you don't mind me asking.

1) i wanted my synths to sound like no one's else, so began to learn how it all works.
2) i primarily interested in creating presets for FM (OxeFM, Dexed) and hybrid (Phasex, Whysynth) software synths at the moment, but experimenting with subtractive synths too (my favorites are Helm, TAL NoizeMaker and synthv1). anyway, for those who know how synths work, many presets are recreateable on other synths.
i'm also using a hardware FM synth — PreenFM2 and creating patches for it.
adding hardware subtractive synth to my setup is also planned, and it's Audiothingies Micromonsta.

hi, i have a used creative commons for all my production music on jamendo. It' a free download

https://www.jamendo.com/artist/7346/pierecall/albums

An issue (among several) I find perplexing with Creative Commons is that AFAIK they lack a mechanism to easily and clearly license the composition and the recording separately (referred to under copyright law in the US as the PA and SR copyrights respectively).

There are a variety of reasons this might be desirable. For example, many musicians may be under contract for one but not both. Or you may like to retain rights to your composition if you plan to exploit it in the future but are happy to share a CC licensed demo recording in the meantime.

As it stands now, you essentially need to define the distinction yourself if you want to CC license one element but not the other: create your own language and attach two licenses to every posting of every song. It's quite cumbersome.

chaocrator wrote:i'm planning to release my recordings in lossy formats under some CC license.
(lossless formats with better mastering are going to be for sale.)

This is another potential issue to consider with CC licenses. You can certainly accept payment for your remaster, but depending on your jurisdiction the underlying license in your composition and/or recording does not change if you change the mastering or the codec. So if you want to at some point sell or license the remaster to a 3rd party, they will have some things to work out. No mater how many times they remix or remaster Sgt Pepper, the SR still belongs to EMI.

Then there is also that fact that you can't revoke a CC license. You can change your terms or do whatever you want with your work, but the original distribution under CC is not revocable. Imagine this scenario: some evil person wants to change your lyrics to the catchy tune you posted on Soundcloud under a permissive CC license and use your song at a political rally or a hateful meme. With the obligatory CC attribution to you of course. There is absolutely nothing you can do to stop it.

I love the idea of Creative Commons, but these are things worth considering. I did CC for years but now I prefer to retain rights to my work. I give it away free of charge and am happy to do so, but I want to keep it.