A Shared Culture

They mention ccMixter in that video, but I can’t say for sure that ccMixter is 100% legal all the time — according to the current US laws that is. Some songs (not all) found on ccMixter are remixes of commercial music, cleverly disguised, but still that’s something that RIAA can bring to a court if they want to be nasty.

I am personally a strong supporter or Creative Commons, and so all my videos are licensed under the most free CC license, the CC-BY 3.0 (I allow people to make derivatives, use it for commercial purposes etc). I always couple my videos with CC-BY songs found on Jamendo.com (I am careful to use CC-BY only), but I am avoiding ccMixter like the plague, because of fear of copyright infringement that can happen without my knowledge. You can’t be too sure with Jamendo either, but at least it’s a more clean situation that ccMixter.

Originally, I was having trouble using CC-BY music for my CC-BY videos, because there were only 45 albums released under that specific license! But in just a year, we now have more than 340 such albums available on Jamendo (out of 12,000 listed there)! That should be enough for most videographers to find good-enough music for their videos.

You see, it’s a bit difficult with the video situation: the CC-ND license doesn’t let you combine audio with video at all, CC-NC doesn’t even let you upload to youtube, CC-SA limits the uses of the video in other projects. So I had to go with CC-BY-only music, if I wanted maximum freedom for others to use my work. I am glad that now we have enough CC-BY music selection for this purpose.

My CC-BY nature videos have already being used by others in other projects, e.g. a church in Spain who creates video prayers (my video on the background with their music, and prayer text super-imposed on to the image). I am not religious in the slightest, but I am happy to see people re-use my work for their needs.

Sounds interesting, however I find it ironic that in order to enjoy the movie I will have to install Adobe Flash

AWESOME VID… thanks for resharing

Hi Jono – thanks for posting. I’ve come across several CC issues of late, but have not had the chance to sit down, study, and really get my mind around it. This was a big help, so thanks for sharing it.

It is worth noting that the license on the video is not a free culture license. This is not my opinion, Creative Commons themselves recognise this and list only BY and BY-SA licenses as free licenses.

I’m glad you’ve decided to join us and license your album under a free culture license.

“Free” culture in Flash.

Yawn.