Case Studies/MusicBrainz
CC BY-NC-SA by Robert Kaye, MusicBrainz http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/
Musicbrainz plays an important role in blazing the path for open databases... We work hard to make our data useful and available to people, as we believe that Metcalfe’s law also applies to data. Thus, getting lots of people to use our data makes MusicBrainz vastly more useful and valuable. — Robert Kaye
Overview
MusicBrainz is a user-maintained database of information about artists and their music, including title, artist, release date, format, and other data. MusicBrainz started releasing their database of music metadata under a CC license in 2003.
License Usage
The data on MusicBrainz is available as public domain material free to be reused without restrictions or under the CC Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike. The distinctions between types of data are explained here.
Motivations
From their about page:
- "MusicBrainz was initially created by Robert Kaye in response to Gracenote taking over the free CDDB project and charging people for access to the (what up till that point had been free) data."
From CC Talks With Musicbrainz:
- "We work hard to make our data useful and available to people, as we believe that Metcalfe’s law also applies to data. Thus, getting lots of people to use our data makes MusicBrainz vastly more useful and valuable. With that in mind, we want to be the de-facto standard for music metadata in the open content ecology."
- "We have a lot of data that is in the Public Domain, but some of it is creative output of our community and thus copyrightable. These copyrightable bits are placed under a CC non-commercial license, which then opens the door for licensing this content for commercial use. The CC data bundled with the Public Domain data gives us a package that we license for commercial use. In this case we do not license the Public Domain data, but we charge for convenient and timely access to the data. The CC licenses make it possible for us to operate with this new business model because people have vetted the licenses and are comfortable working with them."
Impact
What is the impact of this CC-enabled project or resource? Specifically, what has the license enabled that otherwise would not exist? Provide statistics or other data if possible.
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Technical Details
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Media
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