[advocacy] Personal Music Licence

[Daniel James]

As a complement to the article I wrote, here's a licence that artists
can use to release .ogg files without putting listeners into a legal
grey area, but reserves commercial exploitation of the music for the
copyright holder.

It's in the spirit of the GPL, but much shorter, easier to read and
understand, and adjusted to the reality of commercial music piracy.
There are many countries where CD's and tapes are duplicated on a
massive scale without any artist royalties, and I wouldn't want this
licence to be associated with that kind of behaviour.

The licence doesn't prohibit .ogg files being released on free CD
compilations etc. - as long as the artist gives their consent. In
this age of email, it shouldn't be difficult to track down the artist
to ask them.

Artists and their labels naturally want to retain control over
digital music, but technological control is illusory. If you sell
just one copy of a CD, it can be shared by an infinite number of
people within minutes of it being uploaded to the network. You can
attempt to artificially limit the technology, but that won't be
popular with listeners and will be circumvented by most of them.

I think the challenge is to find a way of working with the
technology, rather than against it. I think labels also have to make
the case to listeners that they should be supporting their favourite
artists with official purchases, whether they can download the music
for free or not.

If you find any flaws in the licence from the artists point of view,
please let me know. The licence itself is in the public domain and
not copyrighted to me or anyone else, so everyone is welcome to use
it.

I'll put the file up at http://mondodesigno.com/music/pml.html

Daniel


*********************

Personal Music Licence

This music is provided for your personal use, not for resale. You may
make verbatim copies of it, distribute it in any medium, and play it
in public as long as you do not charge money for doing so.

You must preserve the artist name and title of the music with any
copies of the music that you distribute, and make a copy of this
licence available with the music.

Commercial distribution, commercial public performance, sampling,
remixing and derivative versions are strictly prohibited without the
artist's explicit consent. The artist asserts copyright on this music,
and that the music contains no unauthorised copyrighted material.

*********************

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