Creative Commons
A Creative Commons license allows you to keep your copyright and to invite others to share your work. By releasing your songs with a CC license, you make it clear what your listeners can and cannot do with your music. Moreover, Creative Commons is an international licensing agreement—which means it's an even more powerful way to protect your rights than copyright.
Why Creative Commons?
There are so many great reasons to publish your music with a CC license:
• Your mom can easily share your songs with your grandma.
• Your grandma can easily share your songs with her online boyfriend.
• Gilberto Gil thinks it's cool.
• Pirates are cool. Piracy is not.
• Creative Commons plays nice-nice with the Web.
• The FBI won't come knocking down your door.
• Music isn't created in a vacuum. It's part of our culture, and you're free to share it! And, oh yeah....
It's free promotion and marketing.
You keep the rights to your songs.
And nobody will make money off your music but you.
Creative Commons on Sutros
All songs uploaded to Sutros are released under a Creative Commons license, or else to the Public Domain. This facilitates the legal sharing and spreading of your music, and ensures that you keep a hold of your rights. Each of your song profiles will contain a CC icon that listeners can click to find out more about how you've chosen to release your song.
The default license for all uploads is Attribution-Nonommercial-No Derivatives, which is the most restrictive CC license. Of course you are free to change the license so that others may remix your song or use it for commercial purposes without further clearance from you. For a full explanation of the various licenses, please visit http://creativecommons.org/about/license/
To find out more about Creative Commons in general and the ways their licenses benefit musicians and their fans, we strongly recommend that you take a look at all the resources available on the Creative Commons website: http://creativecommons.org/ And, for a more thorough examination of the relationship between creativity, innovation and the law, you can take a gander at Lawrence Lessig's book, The Future of Ideas.
