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Creative Commons

We should not forget that this implicit tolerance takes place in a legal grey area - with the industry simply turning a blind eye. But Creative Commons (CC) licences and the success of open source software have created a better understanding of the notion of "free content" in creatively productive musicians and film makers as well as games producers. By now, a good number of music and film recordings have been released under CC licences, and they are also available in free formats like Ogg/Vorbis or Flac for music or the Ogg/Theora video codec.

The Creative Commons licence allows tailored licensing of work which isn't classified as software. To keep the licensing flexible there are various different CC varieties which are each formulated and worded to suit the applicable national legislation. To make things easier for the creative community, creativecommons.org offers effectively a "click to assemble licence" feature which, among other things, allows the following options:

• unconditional (Public Domain Dedication)
• sharing, copying, transforming, commercial use with credit to the original author (CC name: Attribution, or by)
• sharing, copying, transforming, commercial use with credit to the original author and the obligation to choose the same licence (similar to GPL; Attribution Share Alike, by-sa)
• sharing, copying, transforming, but no commercial use with credit to the original author (Attribution Non-commercial, by-nc)
• copying, but no changing of credit to the original author (Attribution No Derivatives, by-nd)

What cannot be excluded is the permission to copy and share, since this is what the CC licence is for. Those who know and value GNU GPL, however, may also consider the Free Documentation Licence (FDL) for texts.

Authors can have triple security: the piece of work itself, its reproduction and the distribution formats used can each be regulated by different free licences. As a piece of music, a Bach piano piece, for example, is by now in the public domain; the author's copyrights, which run for varying numbers of years in different countries, have expired. It may have been recorded, however, by a university orchestra, and the recording may be available under a CC licence allowing people to share it in GPL-compliant audio formats. Mixed licences are available, for example, for audio books: the author retains the rights to the book itself, but may have agreed to sharing it as an audio book licensed under CC.

So how do we find free entertainment which doesn't incur any legal consequences?

Samples

"Sucked into a vortex" – anyone with a decent educational background in science fiction can probably guess what this sample sounds like. Freesounds is by far the most important place to go for original productions of music and sound elements. The project was founded by the Music Technology Group at Barcelona's Pompreu Fabra University.

The catalogue contains almost 20,000 samples of varying length and quality, and of natural and electronic origin, which may be remixed and used freely under the free CC licence. From bird song and other nature sounds to aliens swirling around the room in 50s sci-fi style, the collection is well stocked. Unfortunately, there are no samples of international musical instruments: there is practically nothing which would be within the sound spectrum of Arabic or Indian music - but these samples could easily be provided by hobby musicians from all over the world.

The most important Freesounds sister project is the ccMixter remix site, where all kinds of remixes of free samples are available to be admired, and new remixes can be created. Since both samples and remixes are subject to a Creative Commons licence, most of the remixes can not only be downloaded and shared, but can also be taken apart and newly remixed. Therefore, the same remix can often be found in many variations.

Currently, the fascination of free sound, however, still lies in the sharing and transformation of sound clips rather than in their hit potential. In the same way that good will and free code don't necessarily produce good software in the open source world, free samples don't automatically create a new Missy Elliot, Björk or Jazzmatazz.

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