Those who’ve been reading my work prior to this website’s existence may have noticed my love for Creative Commons, and also my strong belief in and respect for the rights granted to creators through intellectual property law. If you created something, it’s yours, and you should be able to decide how it is used and distributed in the world.

You can decide to reserve all rights, create your own license (ouch), or use a Creative Commons license. Or you can go to the extreme end of the spectrum and just put your work into the public domain.

A Creative Commons license allows you to set the conditions under which others may use your work. I’ve released a large number of songs under Creative Commons licenses, and the response has been great - even resulting in a bunch of remixes. I believe the response has been much greater than it would’ve been had I reserved all rights, slapped a sticker on my work saying “Don’t Touch” and sat by with a shotgun in hand.

There’s a catchphrase regarding the modern web that must die if the Internet is to be and/or remain (depending on your viewpoint) a successful medium of independent publishing. It’s this one:

Everyone is a content producer.

This line lurks everywhere, and it has for years. But it’s wrong.

It never ceases to astound me that whether musicians are worthy of being paid for their efforts is questioned by the public. It is, by and large, a response to the culture that has developed around pirating music. Cultures automatically adjust themselves according to the values of the people who comprise them, and an over-saturated market plus free, easy access to any recording has removed the value people once attributed to good music.