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Last week, I touched a little bit on Creative Commons licensing and how it is being utilized in the creation of The Most Remarkable Album On This Entire Planet. The notion of making absolutely everything within the album accessible to the public, at no financial cost, is an idea that is bold, stunning and definitely worth supporting. Which, by the way, other people are agreeing with, since the basic production cost of 4588 euros has been raised. Regrettably, I have not been able to donate as of yet, due to a serious lack of fundage due to potential baby raising and, more immediately, the formerly past-due medical bills that assisted in the pending baby raising. Still, I look forward to when I am able to listen to the tracks online, and hope to be able to provide to the cause sometime between now and July 13th.
Now, the Creative Commons concept is there to benefit the public and artist alike. The normal person benefits by being able to read or hear whatever the artist is offering for free, not to mention share with whatever friends he or she wants to. The artist benefits by being able to get his or her work out there into the internet to share while still retaining rights to the material. For example, Bad Karma Ink here has a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license. Basically, at least for bkI, you can share whatever is on here where ever, just as long as you refer back to bkI via a link, do not alter the work, and do not make money off of it.
Not a bad trade-off, right? The public gets free stuff and the artist gets noticed.
So, you would expect a big media company to respect these rights, correct? After all, big media such as the RIAA and MPAA (That be the Recording Industry and Motion Picture Associations of America) expect you to follow copyright law. One would think that big business would actually practice what they preach.
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