Open Licenses

Please note: This guide has been produced by individuals who are not lawyers. Nothing in this page should be considered as legal advice. Also in Musical Artifacts, all licenses apply to the artifact files themselves and not to any piece of music or sound which might be produced from such files.

When sharing your work, it's important to let other people know which kinds of uses you allow them to make and a license can tell them that. Please have in mind that it will more fruitful to use a license as a guideline for the user of your work to do the right thing, e.g., credit you and mostly know that he won't have any trouble. As opposed to using a license as a list of things you want to prevent the user of doing, because we can't really do that unless you want to go to court and disparage the people that like your work.

So remember:

• Licenses are effective at helping good intentioned people who use your work to do the right thing. Credit you, link to your work, share alike, etc...
• Licenses are not very effective at preventing people from using your work however they want (but you could try...)

Why use an open license

• Give back to the community, you probably used some kind of open knowledge to create your artifacts or your art
• Help creating an open and accessible pool of works that will transcend your initial contribution
• Maximize the number of quality creative works and quality artifacts
• Recognition. You'll make people happy, and happy people give credit and contribute back

Appropriate Licenses for Artifacts

Free/Libre/Open (FLO) licenses

• GNU GPL or other free software licenses
• Creative Commons CC0, CC BY, or CC BY-SA See CreativeCommons.org/choose

Non-FLO licenses

Anything that blocks sharing or use is discouraged, but we do include such items. These non-free terms include All Rights Reserved and Creative Commons licenses that say "no" i.e. the NC or ND clauses. For more, see creativecommons.org/freeworks

References

• Guide to Open Licensing