Copyleft

Danny Scott's article entitled Giving it all away in The Sunday Times talks about a new breed of on-line musicians making their tunes freely available to others to sample or remix. They don't want money, they're spreading the love.

He covers 2 organisations that I support: Freesound and Creative Commons.

The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, ... released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License.

The Freesound Project provides new and interesting ways of accessing these samples, allowing users to browse the sounds in new ways using keywords, a "sounds-like" type of browsing and more up and download sounds to and from the database, under the same creative commons license interact with fellow sound-artists!

They also aim to create an open database of sounds that can also be used for scientific research. Many audio research institutions have trouble finding correctly licensed audio to test their algorithms. Many have voiced this problem, but so far there hasn't been a solution.

And Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.

They provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.