Free Music For Streamers (And Everyone Else) - Copyright, Public Domain, and The Commons

A comment on Alpha Gaming's discussion of copyright, relating to recent DCMA activity on the streaming site Twitch: "Why I Started My Own Record Label"

Photo by mali maeder from Pexels

I'm surprised you didn't say anything about Creative Commons licensing (a specific kind of "some rights reserved" licensing similar to MIT and GPL), which uses all the proper legalese to prove those promises that you made regarding the music on your own label - and because all CC licenses are legally unrevokable, any rights a redistributor has to the music will only expand over time. Any issue that content creators may discover by using creative commons licensed works can also arise by using privately licensed work. The main issue seems to be when people redistribute content that isn't their creation or they don't have redistribution rights for sources/samples; and this can occur on any platform regardless of what license is used; for instance, consider most TV show streaming sites - they look legit, they charge you money, but when they get DCMAd you find out they were out for a quick buck. I've had something similar happen to me on a stock photo site, and that's one of the reasons I carefully read ToS of sites that provide content, and often refuse to use privately licensed material unless I know the content creator personally. In the cases where I'm basically expecting some corporation to come after a chunk of my pie no matter what I do, assuming I ever even get a pie (don't count your pies before they bake?), I'm not about to pay for the privilege.

IANAL but if you're looking for content to use in your videos that does not cost money, look for creative commons licensing that includes the terms
"derivative works allowed" (1) AND "commercial purposes allowed" (2),
OR "public domain" (aka CC-0, no rights reserved).

1: Videos where action is timed to music are legally defined as derivative works; videos with music playing in the background, to my knowledge, are not yet legally defined as anything at all; due to this, community praxis is to consider all videos that do not fall under "fair use" to be "derivative". 2: Streaming services make money from streamed and hosted content even if the streamer does not (remember, you are a product).

Make note of any "share-alike" content as you will need to use a CC-SA license for streams and VoDs containing content with that particular license; twitch in particular has exclusivity on videos released by affiliates and partners - if you have signed away the right to redistribute your own content then you do not have the rights necessary to release your content under a share-alike license at the time of initial posting; IANAL but this would violate the spirit of the share-alike license if not legally prohibit use of share-alike content entirely.

Also, these licenses can be recommended to indie musicians to protect both the musician and the content creators. Anything you declare as creative commons or public domain under the creative commons license, with a link to the creative commons legal text, is protected (from corporate control) by using those existing licenses. Creative commons and public domain licensing have legal documentation that states the license cannot be revoked and made more private; private licenses can often be revoked at any time. To reference the example used in the video, if an indie musician signs with a record label, the record label cannot legally copyright strike any music previously released under a creative commons license, as the right to restrict the license no longer belonged to the musician at the time of signing.

Here are the human-readable explanations of each license type, click on the license name to see the legal text that defines it.

Anything released under a creative commons license is properly licensed, rather than being copyright-free, which is why some people use the tongue-in-cheek term "copyleft" to refer to permissive licenses like these.