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SoundCloud Integrates CC-Licensing

Open Culture

SoundCloud, a new media sharing site aimed at musicians, has been receiving heaps of great press since going live last week. SoundCloud allows musicians to post their works easily, share them securely, interact with other musicians in a collaborative fashion, check stats on song listens/comments, and utilize a bevy of other useful features. Excitingly for the CC-community, SoundCloud announced today that users can now upload their works under a CC license or a public domain declaration. From SoundCloud:

The CC license support on SoundCloud is pretty straight-forward. You can pick a license when you upload a track, and you can set a default license in your settings. There are three main modes; All Rights Reserved, Some Rights Reserved, and No Rights Reserved. The default is All Rights Reserved, which means you own all rights to the works you upload.

You can also select the Some Rights Reserved-option which will give you a nice interface where you can assemble your Creative Commons license. You can select whether Commercial use is ok, whether derivative works are ok, or whether derivative works should be “shared” alike, meaning derivative works should be shared under the same conditions. Read more about CC licenses here.
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Lastly, there’s the No Rights Reserved-option if you want to let anybody do anything they like with your music.

A cool thing is that we’ve also got RDFa support so that all license information will be properly encoded for machine-reading directly in the track pages.

We are super excited to see this sort of support happen as it should greatly increase the functionality of SoundCloud for CC-using musicians and open the doors for a new repository of CC-licensed music. That SoundCloud has successfully implemented RDFa (making them one of the first CC-using content directories to do so) is similarly exciting. Learn more about SoundCloud here and if you are CC-using musician, try it out for yourself.

Posted 17 October 2008

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