EFF’s Open Audio License allows anyone to freely copy, share, perform, and adapt music in exchange for providing credit to the artist for her gift to humanity.
EFF’s Open Audio License allows anyone to freely copy, share, perform, and adapt music in exchange for providing credit to the artist for her gift to humanity.
Principles
Digital technology and the Internet can empower artists to reach a worldwide audience and to build upon each other’s ideas and imagination with extremely low production and distribution costs. Many software developers, through both the open source software initiative and the free software movement, have long taken advantage of these facts to create a vibrant community of shared software that benefits creators and the public.
EFF’s Open Audio License provides a legal tool that borrows from both movements providing freedom and openness to use music and other expressive works in new ways. It allows artists to grant the public permission to copy, distribute, adapt, and publicly perform their works royalty-free as long as credit is given to the creator as the Original Author.
As in the software communities, this license is intended to help foster a community of creators and performers who are free to share and build on each others’ work while freeing their audience to share works that they enjoy with others, all for the purpose of creating a rich and vibrant public commons.
More specifically, this license is designed to serve as a tool of freedom for artists who wish to reach one another and new fans with their original works. It allows musicians to collaborate in creating a pool of “open audio” that can be freely modified, exchanged, and utilized in new ways. Artists can use this license to promote themselves and take advantage of the new possibilities for empowerment and independence that technology provides. It also allows the public to experience new music, and connect directly with artists, as well as enable “super distribution” where the public is encouraged to copy and distribute a work, adding value to the artist’s reputation while experiencing a world of new music never before available.
For more info and complete license click here
Author: EFF
News Service: Slashdot.org
URL: http://www.eff.org/IP/Open_licenses/20010421_eff_oal_1.0.html
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