Posted by Technobarbarian on 11/15/21 11:27

"Gambini" <andygamble@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1127472381.046084.103010@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> Quick one for you all. Theres a wealth of freely available music from
> various artisits at places like http://www.vitaminic.com etc.
>
> Where do I stand with grabbing an artists track and storing it on my
> webserver. Then publicising it and letting people download from me.
> Presumably I need the artists permission to distribute? Or because its
> freely available anyway can I do what I like?

Unfortunately there is no one easy answer, it all depends on the
conditions on distribution set by the copyright holder. In many cases these
conditions are very lax and you can freely distribute the music as long as
you give the artist credit for their work. At the other extreme there's
stuff floating around because people assumed there were no conditions on its
distribution, when in fact it has full copyright protection. And, of course,
there's a lot of stuff floating around that's somewhere between these two
extremes.

A lot of the stuff floating around is distributed with a "creative
commons" license. Check here for more info: http://creativecommons.org/

Here's another site with some good information: http://www.pdinfo.com/
Pay particular attention to this link: http://www.pdinfo.com/record.htm The
one big exception to what they're saying here is when the artist or
copyright holder places the work in the public domain.

This site also has a lot of useful information:
http://wiki2.etree.org/index.php?page=TradeFriendly
http://www.archive.org/audio/etree.php

TB

[Back to original message]