Open and Free Music Resources
One of the difficult areas for student filmmakers (as well as low budget indie productions) is sourcing music. Composers can be expensive and may fall outside of budget, time or logistic restrictions; and sourcing copyright on music can be a painful and slow process when dealing with major record labels. In the same vein, its very common to need small sections of music, aural bridges and motifs, to work into the edit but which would seem too small to demand the attention of a dedicated composer. In both these cases there are alternatives to breeching traditional copyright and goign through the tedium of seeking copyright releases.
OpSound is a fantastic resource of free Creative Commons music. In much the same vein as
StockXchang, OpSound provides a vast library of audio resourses that do not require permissions or fees to use in your projects. All Music on OpSound is licensed under
Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.5 copyright.
CC Share Alike simply requires that the creator of the music is credited (thats the Attribution part) and, more importantly, that any derivative works that use the music (ie a film using the music as part of the score) use the same Creative Commons copyright (thats the Share Alike part)
In other words, you cannot use music copyrighted as 'CC Share Alike' and then use traditional restrictive Copyright on the resulting combined work. If you use the CC Share Alike material you must 'pass on' the same freedom.That freedom is the right for anyone to to Share to copy, distribute and transmit the work and to Remix to adapt the work.
Some may baulk at this idea, it goes against the grain of the inbuilt 'copyright' culture we have grown up in. But Creative Commons is becoming an increasingly popular and viable way to make more open creative projects that retain some legal rights and protections but do not automatically restrict further use and distribution. For more info on Creative Commons check out their website
www.creativecommons.org
Posted at 12:00AM May 02, 2008
by Mike Jones in audio |
