Free Music Resources

OpSound (http://www.opsound.org/) is a fantastic resource of free Creative Commons music. In much the same vein as StockXchang OpSound provides a vast library of audio resourses that do not require permissions or fees to use in your film projects.

All Music on OpSound is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.5 copyright. The full details of this type of copyright are here.

CC Share Alike simply requires that the creator of the music is credited (thats the Attribution part) and, more importantly, that any derivative works that use the music (ie a film using the music as part of the score) use the Same Creative Commons copyright (thats the Share Alike part)

In other words, you cannot use music copyrighted as ‘CC Share Alike’ and then use traditional restrictive Copyright on the resulting combined work. If you use the CC Share Alike material you must ‘pass on’ the same freedom.

That freedom is the right for anyone to to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work and to Remix — to adapt the work.

Creative Commons is becoming an increasingly popular and viable way to make more open creative projects that retain some legal rights and protections but do not automatically restrict further use and distribution.

For more info on Creative Commons check out their website www.creativecommons.org