Legally Free Moby Tunes for the Indie You

Moby’s made some good tracks over the years, you gotta admit it, and yeah, he made money getting them in commercials like crazy, but now he’s done a cool license trick to give something back - over 70 of his tracks have recently been published on a section of his site called MobyGratis with a unique contract allowing any indie filmmaker to use them freely, as well as non-profits and students- all are welcome to grab from the site and use the tracks, no holds barred. Moby’s registration requires a lot more info then I like giving to a website, usually too many required fields will send me a travellin on, but if I really want those tracks, I’ll get over it.

hi,
i’ll keep this brief.

to use the site you log in(or on?) and are then given a password.
you can then listen to the available music and download whatever you want to use in your film or video or short.
the music is free as long as it’s being used in a non-commercial or non-profit film, video, or short.
if you want to use it in a commercial film or short then you can apply for an easy license, with any money that’s generated being given to the humane society.
i hope that you find what you’re looking for,
moby

Now isn’t that nice? Note that aside from the whole “legal for filmmakers” thing, there’s also the whole “become members of my site and you get access to my music free” thing, which I think is a huge part of the future of the music industry online- I happen to disagree that the music industry is dying, personally I think it’s changing, and maybe even for the better for those willing to adapt.

I remember doing a talk on open source a few years ago somewhere, and getting challenged on which license we use, which is an important question, with some people in the audience attacking Creative Commons for various reasons. My point then and now is that it matters less to me what formal options are being laid out by Creative Commons (though I like Attribution 2.5, and non-commercial has it’s place). It’s more interesting to me that they facilitate a maker’s ability to individually tweak a license, and in doing so to tweak the system.

By giving you a toolkit and working hard to explain and publicize it, Creative Commons brings an important avenue for independence into public awareness and frees us a bit from an antiquated feeling of the law being whatever the power formation in that industry decides, with their teams of lawyers, to enforce. As Lessig, CC founder, says, it frees us a bit from asking permission to contribute to culture. CC, and open source thinking in general, helps undo some fear-based positions like, I need to sign whatever deal they give me so they’ll sort out all this impossible legalese. You can formalize for yourself how people are allowed to interact with your work.

The thing I like best about “web 2.0″ - ie; web worlds created in constant interaction with the formerly passive(ish) web audience, like the CC license maker as just one example - is that it can enable our D.I.Y impulses in whole new ways, while also triggering the power of people in a network to create more layers in industries before they become dangerously over-concentrated. Moby’s doing the same thing in a way - taking hold of the power in his catalogue (which he clearly still owns rights to) and using the value in there to drive, with gifts for his members (who are another kind of capital - a high number of registered users =power), the growth of the indie economy. Cool moves, Moby, well played Sir!

It’s always been this way, always been possible for Moby to come up with his own license scheme to meet his needs, but it wasn’t really being done much before we could use the internet to archive and facilitate, especially not in this “empower my users and my causes” type of way…

Does anyone know other good examples of license tweaking, esp pre-internet?