For those of you that are unaware, I thought i’d share some information in this blog about Creative Commons. Lawrence Lessig has been a driving force in creating a non-profit organisation with new, groundbreaking copyright rules, that aim to guide forward-thinking musicians and artists through a new digital age of arts.

Building upon existing laws, Creative Commons licenses adapts them to allow remixing, mashing, evolving and combining of existing works, which makes for a creative freedom that will surely help inspire many new artists; influence is a powerful motivator, and something that creative people love to share. The original artists are able to choose which rights they want to maintain, and which they can offer to allow experimentation and sharing for future works, the idea often being that no work is ‘finished’, and that by sharing and giving in this 2.0 world, exposure, discovery and accreditation are more important than direct revenue from one set product.

Lessig is not aiming for an out-of-control, misdirected world where no-one has any rights to any of their work, hence the Creative Commons tagline adapting ‘All rights reserved’ to ‘Some rights reserved’. His intention is to avoid the problems and boundaries created by current copyright laws, not to send the arts world into anarchy by declaring ‘No rights reserved’ on all works, something that major corporations and governing bodies are failing to understand, especially within the music industry.

There are four main parts of Creative Commons licenses, all available for free, can be combined together, and the Wikipedia page offers a good explanation;

* Attribution (by) requires users to attribute a work’s original author. All Creative Commons licenses contain this option, but some now-deprecated licenses did not contain this component.
* Authors can either not restrict modification, or use Share-alike (sa), which is a copyleft (a play on the word copyright and describes the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work for others and requiring that the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions) requirement – it requires that any derived works be licensed under the same license, or No derivatives (nd), which requires that the work not be modified..
* Non-commercial (nc) requires that the work not be used for commercial purposes.

As an example, Chicago-based record label Rock Proper have just released a new album under a Creative Commons BY-NC license, “making the experimental rock songs therein freely sharable/remixable as long as [the artist] is properly attributed and reuses are noncommercial in intent”.

I feel that this is important to share in this blog, and strongly suggest a bit of further reading from my links, as I believe that independent musicians can use the licenses to their advantage, and, through a good promotional idea and strategy, help raise awareness of the original, and ultimately the artist (/brand) behind that work. Putting creative freedom above trying to directly sell a product opens up other income streams such as touring, merchandise and more, and with the right online presence, you can really make this boost your music career.

Lee Jarvis.