OpenSource music licenses


Klumpen

Run away! Run away!
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Like me some of us here may be composing now and then and since licenses like GNU and MIT are a thing here, I'd like to ask what licenses you use for your music.
The scores of all my tunes are publicly available under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-SA which means as much as "free to use as long as the author is mentioned, only used without commercial context and isn't edited without my permission".
The creative commons license is pretty much standard in bal folk circles and (fun fact) unsurprisingly many of those use Linux as well. My session has more or less always multiple Linux users.

Now I'd like to know if this license is valid everywhere and what other OpenSource licenses are out there for music/scores.

Since the GEMA is a big deal (and the reason for most Youtube-blocks in the world), this is kind of a hot topic for many musicians in this area.
 
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The MIT license is analagous to CC-BY, and the GPL (sort of) to CC-BY-SA.

NC and ND are not really Free/OpenSource (and whether you can use other people's content under those licenses on Youtube is debateable).

The "freedom" idea doesn't seem to have caught on in the music world the way it has for software and wikis.
 
IANAL (check ifross.org for opinions of actual lawyers), but AFAICT any CC-BY-xxx is a good choice and should be valid mostly everywhere. It's pretty widely used for scores already, e.g. on mutopiaproject.org.

Standard software licenses can be used, too, but IIUC this is not recommended, because they often contain software specific language, that may make them unclear when applied to non-software items.

I personally think that the nc/nd clauses limit the creative potential of open source too much, but obviously that is a decision for the creator to make. (FWIW: when looking around it seems to me that a lot of creativity and learning happens by - often only slightly - modifying existing things; and pretty much everything is not non-commercial, at least when interpreted strictly - e.g. as HelenF said distribution using commercially operated platforms).
 
Where can I hear your music ?
On various sessions, they are all free including our monthly one. Folk is alive, most of it doesn't get recorded because if you want to hear a tune, you usually play it yourself and if you want to dance you find someone to play it (or something of the kind) for you. I'm one of the few which bother with scores at all, most people learn stuff directly from others at some meeting and often have no clue where or if there is a score somewhere.

I personally think that the nc/nd clauses limit the creative potential of open source too much, but obviously that is a decision for the creator to make. (FWIW: when looking around it seems to me that a lot of creativity and learning happens by - often only slightly - modifying existing things;
Yeah, I'm still on the fence about ND but I would not like to be associated with techno, hip-hop or far-right rock in any way, everything else would be fine and people could still just ask.
Spontanious massive variations while playing are a given with this kind of music.

pretty much everything is not non-commercial, at least when interpreted strictly - e.g. as HelenF said distribution using commercially operated platforms).
Jam sessions are usually not and those are 90% of the bal folk scene and the online tunebooks (mostly abc-code collections) are all non-commercial as well, at least I've never seen a single ad on any of those.
 
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To exclude forms of enjoyment and people with certain beliefs from enjoying the music makes it perhaps what you wanted to avoid in the first place.

Edit: The CC-licenses have a stated version, and also often intl or not.
 
By the way, one of my favourite bands (Blowzabella) has released the whole score from the 2013 album as CC-BY-NC-SA and hosted the tunebook on their homepage a while back:
http://blowzabella.co.uk/resources/
They are giving courses on how to play and arrange tunes, dancing the folk dances from England and France, etc... I had the pleasure of having two courses (hurdy-gurdy and english country dancing) and a concert filling the whole yesterday.
They're kind of on a mission to make (dance) music personal and fun again.

Excerpt of some people having fun with it:
 
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Something is making a very matrix-printer type of sound, i like it.
That would be the wheel fiddle's buzzer (or "chien" in French and "Schnarre" in German) played by impulses via the right arm/hand. Many people hate the sound but it creates the groove and is quite hard to master, especcially while playing fast melodies.
One workshop of the band is mostly about doing it right.
 
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