Creative Commons allows us to not accidentally infringe on your copyright
Say, for instance, that I wanted to make a video blog about some news topic, and I needed some background music. Generally, I’ve used non-local content from the Free Music Archive, and I’ve done so specifically because I was trying to respect copyright. Granted, the odds are slim that some local musician would get all that upset if I used one of their songs in the background of some video — ideally, they’d be flattered — but it could happen. And while it would be hard to claim that anyone got screwed out of royalties on an amateur video by a small-potatoes community blog, it would still be a jerk move to treat local musicians as my own personal jukebox.
The more pressing point, however, is that there’s really no means for me — or anyone else, for that matter — to legally use local music without getting the express permission of the musicians. Sometimes this would be easy enough to do, and it would be something as simple as writing an e-mail asking for permission. But then there’s the matter of actually getting access to the music in the first place. MySpace doesn’t allow direct downloads anymore, for instance, so that same e-mail now requires me to ask for a copy of the song. And then there’s the thorny part where I’d have to clarify exactly what I’m wanting to use the song for, whether I could edit the song to fit the alloted time, what kind of credit needs to be given (does the band get credit, or the actual songwriter in the band?) and several other small, but legally important details.
For one video featuring one local song created by one blog each week, this might not be such a huge hassle. But what if we decided to use exclusively local music on all our videos here at the Spark? And what if we upped our number of videos to three or four a week, or even one or two a day? And what if some other local media groups or video bloggers wanted to do the same thing? This good idea that cross-promotes local media with local music could very quickly become something of a hassle.
What if there was a way around that? What if local bands and musicians started making at least some of their songs available with a Creative Commons license? And by picking a few simple options outlining what people can and can’t do with their music, they’d be able to make their music available to people all around the world to use in the same way we’d like to at the Spark. Everyone wins.
So, that’s my challenge this week. I’m asking all local musicians to consider adding a few tracks to a creative-commons music site — Jamendo.com is a good example — to make it a little easier for us to share your music. We get cool background music by local performers (rather than using that same kind of music by non-locals), you get some cool promotion for work you’ve already done, and our viewers get to be exposed to new sounds. Everyone wins.
I’m not asking every local musician to upload every song they’ve written, mind you. Even a few jams or tracks you’ll never use for some reason or other would be fine. If you have a song you’re certain is going to be a hit, and you don’t want someone using it in a video blog or remixing it as a ’90s rave track with audio clips from Barney Miller, that’s fine. But at least consider the benefits of sharing a few tunes.
And if you do decide to upload a song or two to a site that supports Creative Commons, please leave a comment with a link to the song in the fields below. I’ll certainly make every effort to include it in a future video blog, situation and music permitting.
Steve Shanafelt
I have a great short little video I’d like to share about when creative commons were getting their start. Some of you may have, or may not have, heard of the bad called Negativland. They were notorious about copyright infringement to where they were getting sued by Disney, Pepsi, the band U2, and others, to where they became kinda spokesmen for fair use copyright stuff.
Their music, as you probably guessed, is heavily sample based and it’s quite entertaining how they went about the whole thing and rubbed it in. Well anyway, Creative Commons came to them hoping they would help put together a new fair use thing, but they took it even a step beyond, and well, I guess you’ll have to hear it from the horses mouth. He explains it better anyway. -and please feel free to check out their songs on Pepsi, U2, Disney, and there’s several others that are simply great. So here’s that interview I just wanted to share about all that. Sorry about the long winded-ness. blAh*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy7fgfodly4
I’ve started to do a bit of video stuff now that I have a camera that is video capable. It’s really something that is more of an extension of my photography at the moment, but it is kind of neat to play with so far. One thing that I’ve been wondering is how to include some background music. So, thanks for those couple of links. They will help me not accidentally steal something.
Windows movie maker is easy to find to download for free Craig. You can add music to video easy enough.
The thing ya mentioned about not being able to download music files on myspace Steve, you can download “audiophile” online for free and record whatever is coming out your speakers.
My attitude towards my music stuff with copyright is, I figure, free for all for whatever. Giving credit is always nice, but no worries either way.
I download a ton of art online, and I just figure as long as I give accreditation it’s all good.
Capturing audio isn’t really the issue for me, it’s more wanting to make sure I don’t violate anyone’s copyright. The main reason for this is that YouTube will kill the audio on your videos, take down your videos and then delete your user account if your vids are consistently flagged for copyright violations. I’d prefer to keep that from happening, and using CCL and free music is a good way to play it safe.
I meat “audacity” on that sound program, not audiophile. doh!
“meant” double doh!
By the way, if you’re looking to get into non-linear video editing (with multiple video, audio tracks and transitions and stuff), you could check out Blender. It’s an open source 3d animation program, but it also happens to have a fantastic video editor. Most of the videos I’ve done for the Spark have been in Blender.
Blender: http://www.blender.org/
Blender’s Video Sequence Editor basics: http://blog.rfquerin.org/2009/01/26/how-i-edit-videos-using-blender-maybe-part-one/
I had Blender a couple of years ago. Yet another faded interest … Anyway, I degress. It has a video editor in it now? I remember it had the animation editor, but I don’t think it could pull in video codexes/codices at the time.
My understanding is that they developed it so that people could cut together their rendered animations without switching to another program. It’s not perfect and it has limited options for effects (I’m not big on those, though), but it’s one of the best, least-crash prone open-source video editors I’ve used. Once you learn the keyboard commands, it’s actually faster than something like Premiere for simple editing, and it renders VERY fast.
As far as being able to work with different codecs, I’ve found it to be outstanding. It’s the only editor I’ve found that properly handles the WVGA MP4 Quicktime videos my Kodak zi8 writes. It’s not an issue for Mac users (iMovie loves Quicktime), but Quicktime support on Windows is generally crappy, and something like Windows Movie Maker can’t even read the format, meaning you have to covert it to AVI or something even to edit it. Blender handles it perfectly.