The Open Audio License is a free music license created in 2001 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). [1] It provides freedom and openness of use for music and other expressive works. Publication of the first version of the Open Audio License spurred the creation of the original Open Music Registry to support the license and provide a directory for finding works released under the license.
The EFF now encourages artists to use the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license instead of the Open Audio License, and it "designates the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license as version 2.0 of the Open Audio License." [2] The Creative Commons licenses express the same principles as the original Open Audio License—a recognition that some creators want to make their works available to the public on less restrictive terms than copyright's defaults, with permission to copy, distribute, adapt, and publicly perform their works.
Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public. These licenses allow authors of creative works to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Content owners still maintain their copyright, but Creative Commons licenses give standard releases that replace the individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, that are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management.
The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) is an American not-for-profit performance-rights organization (PRO) that collectively licenses the public performance rights of its members' musical works to venues, broadcasters, and digital streaming services.
Free music or libre music is music that, like free software, can freely be copied, distributed and modified for any purpose. Thus free music is either in the public domain or licensed under a free license by the artist or copyright holder themselves, often as a method of promotion. It does not mean that there should be no fee involved. The word free refers to freedom, not to price.
Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of its licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics.
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.
The Free Art License (FAL) is a copyleft license that grants the right to freely copy, distribute, and transform creative works except for computer hardware and software, including for commercial use.
Loca Records is a British independent electronica and post rock record label based in Brighton, England. All the music, artwork and videos are released under copyleft licenses and distributed physically on vinyl, CD, and cassette. Inspired by the free software movement, Loca Records allows similar freedoms as the GNU General Public License on their releases, including copying, re-release, modification, and sampling, with the requirement that the new work uses the same license.
Magnatune is an American independent record label based in Berkeley, California, founded in spring 2003. It only sold music for download through its website but added a print-CD-on-demand service in late 2004 and in October 2007 began selling complete albums and individual tracks through Amazon.com. In May 2008, Magnatune launched all-you-can-eat membership plans. From March 2010 Magnatune dropped the CD printing service and moved exclusively to all-you-can-eat membership plans. Magnatune was the first record label to license music online and as of May 2015 had sold over 7,000 licenses in its twelve years of existence.
Opsound was a website which aggregated links to music released under Creative Commons licenses. Opsound aggregated links to music hosted on other servers, as well as provided discussion forums and organized real-world events and concerts. It published one CD by the artist Catalpa Catalpa entitled "Hardoncity."
Share-alike (🄎) is a copyright licensing term, originally used by the Creative Commons project, to describe works or licenses that require copies or adaptations of the work to be released under the same or similar license as the original. Copyleft licenses are free content or free software licenses with a share-alike condition.
The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, by using the Internet and other forms of media.
The commercialization of copylefted works differs from proprietary works. The economic focus tends to be on the commercialization of other scarcities, and complimentary goods rather than the free works themselves. One way to make money with copylefted works is to sell consultancy and support to the users of the work. Generally, financial profit is expected to be much lower in a business model utilising copyleft works only than in a business using proprietary works. Another way is to use the copylefted work as a commodity tool or component to provide a service or product. Android phones, for example, include the Linux kernel, which is copylefted. Unlike business models which commercialize copylefted works only, businesses which deal with proprietary products can make money by exclusive sales, single and transferable ownership, and litigation rights over the work, although some view these methods as monopolistic and unethical, such as those in the Free Software Movement and the Free Culture Movement.
Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information is any kind of creative work, such as a work of art, a book, a software program, or any other creative content for which there are very minimal copyright and other legal limitations on usage, modification and distribution. These are works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and modified by anyone for any purpose including, in some cases, commercial purposes. Free content encompasses all works in the public domain and also those copyrighted works whose licenses honor and uphold the definition of free cultural work.
Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, freedoms refers to the use of the work for any purpose, and the ability to modify, copy, share, and redistribute the work, with or without a fee. Licenses which implement copyleft can be used to maintain copyright conditions for works ranging from computer software, to documents, art, and scientific discoveries, and similar approaches have even been applied to certain patents.
The GNU Free Documentation License is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the rights to copy, redistribute, and modify a work and requires all copies and derivatives to be available under the same license. Copies may also be sold commercially, but, if produced in larger quantities, the original document or source code must be made available to the work's recipient.
The Definition of Free Cultural Works evaluates and recommends compatible free content licenses.
The Open Database License (ODbL) is a copyleft license agreement intended to allow users to freely share, modify, and use a database while maintaining this same freedom for others.
A free license or open license is a license that allows copyrighted work to be reused, modified, and redistributed. These uses are normally prohibited by copyright, patent or other Intellectual property (IP) laws. The term broadly covers free content licenses and open-source licenses, also known as free software licenses.
A public license or public copyright license is a license by which a copyright holder as licensor can grant additional copyright permissions to any and all persons in the general public as licensees. By applying a public license to a work, provided that the licensees obey the terms and conditions of the license, copyright holders give permission for others to copy or change their work in ways that would otherwise infringe copyright law.
The following sites provide content under the Open Audio License: