SoundCloud (www.soundcloud.com), the popular audio-file-hosting web service, have just announced a partnership with Creative Commons, a fast-growing organisation that aims to help creators of intellectual property (including photos, videos and music) share their content with other people, for re-use and adaptation.
Tracks uploaded to SoundCloud, and licensed for re-use, can now be easily found via a dedicated page on the SoundCloud web site (www.soundcloud.com/creativecommons), so budding producers and remixers (and, indeed, video editors who need music for their films) can easily find legal content to use for free.
Conversely, musicians who wish to benefit from the potential increase in exposure that such extended licences can provide can now do so with ease, thanks to a range of licenses that mark their work as available for others to use.
The licence terms vary considerably, depending on the permissions that the content generator grants. For example, you can allow your content to be re-used, provided that you are credited as its author, while insisting that your work cannot be changed, and cannot be exploited financially. At the other end of the scale, you can waive pretty much all of your rights, allowing people to modify your work, include it in other works, and even sell any work that they create using it. In short, it’s entirely up to the author to choose how, if at all, their intellectual property can be made use of by others.
For more information about Creative Commons, check out their web site, below.
