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GarageBand.com Adopts Creative Commons License

Apple’s popular GarageBand.com now offers the Creative Commons Music Sharing License as an optional tag for all songs uploaded to its website.

Apple’s popular GarageBand.com now offers the Creative Commons Music Sharing License as an optional tag for all songs uploaded to its website.

The license, provided by the nonprofit Creative Commons, permits fans not only to download music files, but also to copy and share them, as long as they don’t make commercial uses or alter the work. Such a license allows musicians to harness the power of the Net for maximum promotion while retaining rights to their work. The prominent display of the license on each participating GarageBand.com song page lets fans know what they can legally copy or share.

GarageBand’s growing membership reportedly stands to offer Creative Commons licensing to over 300,000 bands with over 1.8 million songs, which will potentially represent the largest source of legal free downloads and P2P-safe music on the Internet.

Creative Commons copyright licenses come in three expressions: an intuitive, plain-language summary (human-readable); a thorough copyright license complete with “legal-ese;” and a summary of the legal terms in mark-up language, also referred to as metadata (machine-readable). GarageBand.com now embeds the machine-readable layer into the code of its site, so that search engines and fans can find and identify legally shared music.

To see how the Creative Commons’ metadata search engine works, visit search.creativecommons.org.

For further details, visit creativecommons.org.

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