Remixing Today
The following is a quote from ccmixer, a community music remixing site featuring remixes and samples licensed under Creative Commons licenses. This snippet works as a fine English translation of the type of contest rules (legal contracts) that typically accompany legal remixes of material under copywrite.
Most sampling or mash-up contests on the Internet stipulate that you will never own the samples you use in the contest and that after the contest is run you forgo your rights even to the new song you created.
After the contest has been judged, all entries that are not commercially published are essentially useless because rights to the song are given up upon entry and access to files. Typically in these contests there is one winner who has the chance to get the remix published alongside the original track, whether that be on vinyl or on iTunes. Every other contest entry, whether that be 5 or 5,000, belongs to whoever is issuing the competition and are never released.
In using material featured at remixing sites like ccmixer, the products of the material can be used in many other ways, provided that it is for noncommercial purposes. You could, for example, create a remix and enter it into a contest, and then feature the remix on your website or play it on your internet radio station.
So there are alternatives. Remix culture does not have to be a stark white wall. One downside to the creative commons direction, however, has to do with why remixes are desirable in the first place. It’s nice to be able to identify a remix on first listen and to know what is being remixed. This would be an unlikely occurrence with CC material because it doesn’t have the same sort of airplay that other music does. The stuff people know about and would be able to identify is protected by 10,000 armies.
image: ©2006 morguefile.com
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Tags: ccmixer, Commons, contest, copywrite, Creative, internet, remix, sound