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Licensing your music with Creative Commons

L2First instrument 5h P · Community, scenes & practice 10 atoms

Learning objectives

learner can explain how Creative Commons pre-grants permissions on top of copyright, and decompose the six licenses into three binary axes — commercial use, derivatives, share-alike
learner can choose the right license for an intent — copyleft commons (BY-SA), full waiver (CC0), or a restriction — and correctly read what NC and ND actually forbid
learner can write a compliant attribution (title, author, source URL, license name/URL) and distinguish Creative Commons from 'royalty-free'

Capstone — one whole task that evidences the objectives

Given a small catalogue of tracks and a set of intended uses (a video sync, a non-profit fundraiser, a remix album, a full public-domain giveaway), pick and justify a specific CC license for each track, write the exact attribution line a reuser must display, and flag any use the chosen license forbids.

The moment you release a live-coded set, an algorave recording, or a batch of stems, someone will ask “can I use this?” — and the default answer under copyright is no. This module builds toward the whole task of licensing a small catalogue deliberately: for each track, matching an intended use (a video sync, a non-profit fundraiser, a remix album, a full giveaway) to a specific Creative Commons license, writing the exact attribution line a reuser must display, and flagging what the license forbids. For performers who sample and remix live, being on both sides of this transaction is routine practice, not legal trivia.

The arc starts supported: first internalise how CC pre-grants permissions without replacing copyright, then learn to reconstruct all six licenses from three binary axes rather than memorising names — a skill worth drilling to automaticity. From there, work one intent at a time with just-in-time pointers: the copyleft mechanics of ShareAlike for the remix album, the CC0 public-domain waiver for the giveaway, and the two misreadings that bite hardest — that NonCommercial forbids fundraising even by non-profits, and that NoDerivatives forbids syncing to video because sync counts as a derivative. Attribution-writing is practised repeatedly until the four-part format (title, author, source URL, license name/URL) is reflexive. The unsupported capstone then hands you the full catalogue at once.

Every required atom gates the capstone: each intended use in the brief is unanswerable without its corresponding license concept, and the royalty-free contrast is needed to justify choices against paid-clearance alternatives. The supporting atoms enrich rather than gate — CC-powered remix platforms show the commons in action, and a CC-BY-SA book from live coding’s own culture shows the ethos behind the license you may choose.