A more recent development in the world of "music you can use" is Creative Commons.
From what we've seen, the Creative Commons has its greatest impact in the world of "mashups"...where various elements are creatively combined for artistic or entertainment purposes. A perfect example would be a YouTube video featuring certain kinds of existing footage (or possibly footage introduced for the first time in this work) and merged with a preexisting song and sound effects found elsewhere. Creative Commons attempts to define "fair use" for such an effort, which is usually not based around the idea of profit.
Creative Commons was officially launched in 2001 by a group of intellectual property experts, lawyers and web publishers. Creative Commons licenses cover art, music, and writing, but is not designed for software. It's an organization founded to help authors and creators who are interested in sharing their work avoid the very restrictive rules of copyright, and their subsequent chilling effect on users. The licenses available through Creative Commons allow authors and creators to attach a recognizable legal document to their work, especially but not exclusively web work, that allows users to make broad categories of use of that work without further permission. Creative Commons wants to provide tools that solve both problems: a set of free public licenses strong enough to withstand a court's scrutiny and simple enough for non-lawyers to use, but yet sophisticated enough to be identified by various Web applications.
Creative Commons helps copyright holders release their works on terms that are more generous than default copyrights. And it helps creators understand the terms under which their work may be used and assign rights under those terms. Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain. Through its free copyright licenses, Creative Commons offers authors, artists, scientists, and educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to enable a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. From what we've seen, Creative Commons is poorly understood to date, but people do appear to be starting to dip their toes in the water at this point.
Creative Commons is perhaps the most impressive embodiment of the ideas and potential behind RDF and related technologies. The vocabulary is anchored in authority developed by a team of lawyers -- and lawyers, of course, are the profession most associated with nailing down semantics. Creative Commons created a solution, a legal licensing toolkit, in the manner that the open source software licenses gave developers tools to share their code. Creative Commons is helping to instigate cultural change: it is empowering rights holders with the knowledge and tools to decide under what terms they wish third parties to use their creations, while permitting users easy and user-friendly means to use content lawfully without the necessity of requesting permission. The release of the Creative Commons licences has inspired a global revolution, supported by a sub-culture with its own identity, ideology, activities and membership and the spawning of other model licences developed with a similar philosophy, such as Science Commons, Patent Commons and Creative Archive. |