Archive for category 'Copyright'

In light of an article by Erik Möller entitled Creative Commons -NC Licenses Considered Harmful and the discussions surrounding it, we have decided to relicense all our music under the less restrictive Attribution-ShareAlike license. This means that our music may now be used commercially without our permission.

The ShareAlike condition should provide enough protection against commercial exploitation, since any added value (such as CD cover art for example) counts as a derivative work, and as such has to be released to the public under an identical license. The Attribution condition makes sure that we are attributed as specified in our license notice (i e the artists’ name and immaterialmusic.com should be clearly visible).

As always, if you would like to do something with our music but feel that the license is too restrictive or incompatible with your own license, just contact us and we can probably work something out.

Through Copyfight, I found an excellent article by Derek Slater entitled “The Customer Is Always Wrong: A User’s Guide to DRM in Online Music”. It manages to explain in very simple terms exactly why DRM hurts music fans. For example:

Imagine if Tower Records sold you a CD, but then, a few months later, knocked on your door and replaced the CD with one that you can’t play in your car. Would you still feel like you “owned” the CD? Not so much, eh?

But Apple reserves the right to change at any time what you can do with the music you purchase at the iTunes Music Store. For instance, in April 2004, Apple decided to modify the DRM so people could burn the same playlist only 7 times, down from 10. How much further will the service restrict your ability to make legal personal copies of your own music? Only Apple knows.

When will “the industry” finally understand that DRM only serves to annoy and alienate their own customers? I already boycott DRM’ed audio files and copy protected CDs — Hopefully informative pieces like this one will encourage more people to do the same.

Today I came across a very good essay on copyright issues entitled Fixing Copyright. It was written by a group of grad students in the US last year, and tries to pinpoint what’s wrong with current copyright laws, but more importantly, it also suggests what we can do to fix them.

Although the essay is US-centric, most of the concepts and problems presented in it can be applied to other parts of the world. As we speak, global music industry lobby groups such as IFPI are working hard to get similar copyright laws passed in the European Union.