I’ll elaborate a bit on Bryan’s KySTE presentation I previously mentioned. The session made me think about critical copyright concepts such as ‘public performance’ and ‘derivative work’. Granted, the copyright law linked is a fine cure for insomnia, but not exactly light reading. In general, these two concepts are worth considering when working on a project. Does the project lead to a “public performance” or does the creation result in a “derivative work”?
If I create a video and use copyrighted music in the background (without permission, which is often the case), my video is a derivative work. If I load that video to Youtube or to the district website, wouldn’t that also be classified as a public performance of that work? These are the types of issues that were discussed in Bryan’s session.
Bryan mentioned freeplaymusic.com, which is known to have a ‘student use’ agreement. Upon inspection of their terms of use agreement, notice this:
The assignment must be part of student curriculum, must only be viewed or heard within the classroom, campus, on a school’s closed circuit television and/or public announcement system and shall be free from any charge or admission fee. Free Student Educational Use excludes the use by any school in extra-curricular activities including, without limitation, the use in clubs and the use of any kind in performance, non-broadcast multimedia, DVD duplication, distribution and/or broadcast on a public or educational access TV, cable or radio channel, web, blog, and podcast.
Soundzabound was mentioned as well. They proclaim ‘royalty-free music for education’, which is true if you purchase the music and follow their licensing terms.
This led to a discussion of Creative Commons, along with a great overview of the various types of Creative Commons licenses. He also mentioned several good alternative sources of Creative Commons music, including ccMixter, Jamendo and Jamglue.
Lots of info and links here. Thanks, Bryan Sweasy, for putting it together for an informative KySTE session.
Hi,
I am writing in from Opuzz Royalty Free Music Library. Your thread caught my attention.
Thought I'd chip in. Well in any case, any use of copyrighted music (this means any music that you did not compose and perform) would require licensing.
Creative commons is quite complex as you would have to read the fine print from each contributor which usually allows music to be use for personal non profit use or simply for your own listening pleasure. Most of these artist put their work in Creative Commons with intention to encourage more people to listen to their music (more exposure) and in hope, possible a nice record deal.
Some may think a good alternative would be to use classical music where most popular pieces would be royalty free as their composer would have now pass on 50 to 99 years (depending on the country of the composer). However the catch is this, unless you perform these pieces yourself, you would still need a license for the performance of the track. Solo artists or orchestras would require you to pay to use the recording of their performance.
The cheapest and most hassle free way to go is to use royalty free music. However there are many types of royalty free music around or rather many claim to be royalty free. You'll have to read the fine print. As for Opuzz, we do allow our music to be use in all forms of student work, production etc which even include public events, broadcast and even profit oriented productions / duplication like sale of DVD productions – eg sale of DVD (prom night) and even if your students' work get featured on say…CNN iReport. So you can see our terms are pretty flexible and attractive for education customers. Our most popular product by far for universities and school is our hard drive http://www.opuzz.com/hard-drive.asp which holds 321 CDs (3210 themes or close to 22,500 tracks). We are one of the largest independantly owned royalty free music library around. There are extra charges for multiple hard drive units or if you'll need use for multiple campuses or district wide. Do email me viv {at} opuzz dot com if you'd like to know more.