Liberate the Music!

[marmar]

from OnTheCommons.org:




Liberate the Music!
Musopen is ingeniously freeing classical music from the chains of copyrighted recordings.

By David Bollier


Ludwig von Beethoven died 183 years ago. So why is his music still locked behind copyrights and not available for free to everyone? Because even if the music itself is in the public domain, the recordings of his music, or perhaps the sheet music (with special arrangements or notation) can be copyrighted by the orchestras that perform the music or the composers who notate it.

And so if you buy a CD of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, you need to pay your $15 or so to the record label, distributor and retailer, the orchestra and all the lawyers and marketers and other irregulars with a finger in the pie. And then, in the end, you can only listen to the music. You can’t legally download it, share it with friends over the Internet, do a remix of it, play it in a restaurant as background music, or use it as a soundtrack to a film.

A nonprofit group, Musopen, has been around five years as an online library of copyright-free musical recordings and sheet music. Musopen states: “We aim to record or obtain recordings that have no copyrights so that our visitors may listen, re-use, or in any way enjoy music. Put simply, our mission is to set music free.”

The website plans to put most of its music under a Creative Commons license known as CC0 (“CC Zero”), which CC0 is essentially a renunciation of all rights to a work by the copyright holder. As Creative Commons describes it, “Once the creator or a subsequent owner of a work applies CC0 to a work, the work is no longer his or hers in any meaningful legal sense. Anyone can then use the work in any way and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, subject to rights others may have in the work or how the work is used. Think of CC0 as the “no rights reserved” option.” .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://onthecommons.org/liberate-music

[msongs]

1. record your own copy with your own orchestra instead of being a freeloader :-) btw do you

mind if I come to your house and take your computer? so I can "reuse, or in anyway" enjoy it? Thanks!