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Look for music with the Creative Commons seal of approval. There are Creative Commons search engines, in which you can specify whether you want music you can use commercially, or whether you can create derivative works.

There is also the Common Content Catalog, which has a Music Section.

If you like piano, there is my humble offerring, in a variety of audio formats as well as sheet music. I chose to place my music under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.5 license, not just to "eat my own dog food", but because I feel that doing so helps me to advance my music aspirations:

I am weary of my twenty-year career as a software engineer. I need a change. That's why I'm taking piano lessons with the aim of passing the music school entrance audition someday. I'm going to major in musical composition; I want to learn to compose symphonies.

And the lot of my compositions are going to be CC-SA licensed.

I have already found that doing this encourages more people to get to know my music. Now, I know I'm not a pop artist - in fact most people don't like my music, but many do. By giving away my music I'm building a base of fans who will buy tickets to my live concerts some day.

This last weekend I spent four hours in downtown Santa Cruz, California, walking up and down Pacific Avenue passing out handbills that advertise my downloads. On the back is the Creative Commons logo and an encouragement for the recipient to share my music over the Internet and to burn CDs for their friends. I think I gave out over a hundred handbills, and left stacks of them on the counters in two record stores and a musical instrument store.

It's funny, the reactions I get from some people. Many believe that this is too good to be true, that there is some kind of catch, or that I'm trying to sell them something, or indoctrinate them into some kind of cult.

Well, sort of: the Cult of Copyleft.

I made a couple of new friends as I did this, one of them a "Downtown Host" and the other a street musician who plays the guitar.

I also burn CDs of my music to give away. I have a CD label printer that's just a regular inkjet printer with a feed mechanism for CDs. In this way I can make CDs a few at a time, and inexpensively, yet that look professional.

I try to always carry some in my backpack to give to new friends. I also give them to any street musicians that I come across, as a way of introducing myself to the local music community.

I'll give you a CD too - autographed even - if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area or in Santa Cruz County. Just email me at michael@geometricvisions.com and meet me somewhere for coffee or a beer, and I'll bring your CD with me.

Look for music with the Creative Commons seal of approval. There are Creative Commons search engines, in which you can specify whether you want music you can use commercially, or whether you can create derivative works.

There is also the Common Content Catalog, which has a Music Section.

If you like piano, there is my humble offerring, in a variety of audio formats as well as sheet music. I chose to place my music under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.5 license, not just to "eat my own dog food", but because I feel that doing so helps me to advance my music aspirations:

I am weary of my twenty-year career as a software engineer. I need a change. That's why I'm taking piano lessons with the aim of passing the music school entrance audition someday. I'm going to major in musical composition; I want to learn to compose symphonies.

And the lot of my compositions are going to be CC-SA licensed.

I have already found that doing this encourages more people to get to know my music. Now, I know I'm not a pop artist - in fact most people don't like my music, but many do. By giving away my music I'm building a base of fans who will buy tickets to my live concerts some day.

This last weekend I spent four hours in downtown Santa Cruz, California, walking up and down Pacific Avenue passing out handbills that advertise my downloads. On the back is the Creative Commons logo and an encouragement for the recipient to share my music over the Internet and to burn CDs for their friends. I think I gave out over a hundred handbills, and left stacks of them on the counters in two record stores and a musical instrument store.

It's funny, the reactions I get from some people. Many believe that this is too good to be true, that there is some kind of catch, or that I'm trying to sell them something, or indoctrinate them into some kind of cult.

Well, sort of: the Cult of Copyleft.

I made a couple of new friends as I did this, one of them a "Downtown Host" and the other a street musician who plays the guitar.

I also burn CDs of my music to give away. I have a CD label printer that's just a regular inkjet printer with a feed mechanism for CDs. In this way I can make CDs a few at a time, and inexpensively, yet that look professional.

I try to always carry some in my backpack to give to new friends. I also give them to any street musicians that I come across, as a way of introducing myself to the local music community.

I'll give you a CD too - autographed even - if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area or in Santa Cruz County. Just email me at michael@geometricvisions.com and meet me somewhere for coffee or a beer, and I'll bring your CD with me.

There are other websites that like Magnatune allows free or low cost music downloads. Some of these are:

• Creative Commons
• DMusic
• Opsound
• Internet Archives
• Prelinger Archives'
• Common Content

Also there's Berklee Shares where you can find free music lessons.

However, it's not clear to me how they decide what to index. There doesn't seem to be any explanation of that under Yahoo's "Learn more..." link. When I tested the Yahoo index, they had indexed this book, which was already catalogued on commoncontent.org, but not this one, which isn't. So are they simply grabbing everything linked to from commoncontent.org? In general, I don't see how this could really work well, unless they did something like what commoncontent.org gave up trying to do: let people submit listings, and then have a human check whether they're legit.

Really, I don't see a huge problem with the number of software licenses -- GPL is by far the most popular, and people who aren't using GPL for new projects presumably are doing so for strong ideological, commercial, or practical reasons, and won't just change their minds.

What is a big problem is the proliferation of free-information licenses for books, documentation, etc. The GFDL really should have a stake driven through its heart, since it's even been rejected by Debian, which I would've considered the constituency most likely to love and cherish it in the first place. Apart from the invariant sections, it's too long, has an annoying political preamble, and it's hard to interpret. Unfortunately, Wikipedia uses the GFDL, so I don't think it's going away soon.

So here we have seven (I think) versions of CC, plus GFDL, plus OPL (which is dying now that its originator has thrown in his lot with CC), and even some other licenses people use for books and docs, like the design science license (IIRC). That's just way too many licenses. (And CC was even at one point discussing a license only for academic use -- yech.)

Actually if you browse the catalog of free books in my sig, you'll see that the situation is even worse than that. A lot of authors of free books don't even seem to know that copyleft licenses exist for books and docs.

For example, they put up their book with no license, which means that it's illegal to copy it (theoretically even illegal to download it, since that's making a copy!), and as soon as they get tired of hosting the book on a server, the book will evaporate, and can never be legally brought back by anyone else.

You'll also see people using software licenses like GPL for books, which is lame, or making them public domain (or stating on their web page that they're public domain, but then making it clear that they don't understand what public domain is, or why copyleft might be preferable). And the noncommercial flavors of CC are lame, too. A CC-nc book is really no more free than the free AOL disk you get in the mail. As soon as a CC-nc book's author gets tired of serving it up, it's gone forever.

IMO, the most important thing is just to get the word out to non-geeks that the CC licenses exist. It doesn't help that commoncontent.org, which had been one of the biggest boosters of CC, seems to have gone semi-dormant -- new submissions no longer seem to get processed. I've had one waiting to get listed for a couple of months now. Apparently they've had problems with spam submissions, and have just kind of thrown up their hands.

> the Wikimedia Commons (a media repository shared by all Wikimedia projects, currently in beta),

commoncontent.org? Having many Public Domain works is a Good Thing as long as the projects have plans for cross aggregation. I will more enthusiastically contribute if I know my contribution will be assimilated into other numerous works out there.

Don't forget the Creative Commons, which also offers a directory of CC-licensed art.

If you're interested in eventually ceding the work to the public domain, you should definitely examine the Founder's Copyright, which sounds a lot like what you're already trying to do. This might be better than simply writing it down on a "piece of paper", because this is a full legal contract and procedure.

10 LET M$ = "Microsoft"

MSO comes with fonts + clipart, which OOo lacks.

Then use Bitstream Vera brand fonts and Creative Commons licensed clip art. Or for $560 (the cost of one seat of M$ Windows and M$ Office), you can buy a heck of a lot of fonts and clip art.

I was hoping from the article name that this was going to be about a great Open Content digital photo archive, like PDPhoto, OpenPhoto, or all the great stuff at the Internet Archive or Common Content.

Instead it's about somebody else's photos I can't use. Zzzzzzzzzzzz.

They could do it free with some Common Content released under a Creative Commons license. No music tax for people in Canada, almost no cost to Apple, and other people get their music heard. Sure 99% of iPods buyers will delete it all, but who cares? If 1% listen for just a minute, it's that much exposure that the musican had, at no cost to them.

You know, the infamous Cambridge Study that made its way around the net a few months back, which shows that the human brain still easily reads words even if the letters are mixed up, just as long as the first and last letters are correct.

Now this is being exploited by spammers to circumvent filters. Example of one I received today in my "suspect email" folder:


#1 Spupelment aavilable! - Works!

*New* Enahncement Oil - Get hard in 60 seocnds! Amzaing!
Like no ohter oil you've seen.

And naturally it's followed by a block of a couple hundred random dictionary words.
I wonder if how well the bayesian filters are working for this (hash-buster aside)?
I had to resort to activating a whitelist on my ISP's spam filter.

Downloads of commercial music for a fee with specific licensing and DRM restrictions is just a subset of legal music downloads. Last I checked, the Open Music Registry (and Narcopop, and Common Content) were all "legal music sites" that Aussies can use just like anyone else in the world.

Don't buy into and/or support the notion that commercialized music is the only music available. When you see this sort of nonsense in the media, at least take time to write to the publisher to comment on it. I have.

> But it aint going to happen

http://commoncontent.org/

damn straigt!!! and if no one noticed, the Creative Commons "Common Content" registry just went live... you could fill your shared folder with stuff from that!