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New Jamendo Site Has CC License Issues

When we last covered Jamendo 10 months ago, we noted it had “one of the greatest libraries of free music online”. Yet a site redesign last week might put Jamendo in jeopardy.

The new design, which went live almost a week ago, contains very little information about the licenses used, making it all but impossible for site users to comply with them.

Creative Commons is a widely used (including by TorrentFreak) licence system that gives artists/creators the ability to grant permissions for reuse.

The terms are specified in the license, and have become an internet standard in many ways. Yet without an easy way to tell which of the licenses is being used, it causes problems for reuse and distribution – the entire point of both the license, and Jamendo.

Worse, since the work’s license is not being displayed adequately (as described in Creative Common’s guide to marking content) Jamendo may be in breach of the Creative Commons license themselves.

Creative Commons told us that it was not ideal, and that they will be reaching out to Jamendo to fix things and make licensing clearer.

Morgane Dourthe, Sales Team Leader at Jamendo told TorrentFreak “This new version of Jamendo is a first release and a lot things still needs to be improved and modified.” They added that they would be discussing many points this week, and that this would be among them.

For the sake of clarity and compliance, for both artists and users, the sooner the better.

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  • Wayne

    Good time for me to ask, the CC website tells us to use the HTML (which looks ugly at the bottom of the page) You simply have ‘Copy CC’ and link to the correct URL, is that enough?

    My website has linked to the CC URL with the title ‘license’ as yours is ‘Copy CC’, should that be fine?

    • Anonymous

      Yes, that gives a link to the human-readable license which specifies the terms. It’s preferred to use the licence-specific image though.
      Jamendo used to do this, they don’t any more.

  • lhsi

    The Creative Commons info is at the bottom of each page for an individual track, isn’t it?

    • Anonymous

      not in a clear way, and not with a link to the actual license specifying what is and isn’t allowed. The version and locality of the license is also not specified.

  • Chris

    Jamendo has always been trying to rip people off though. They’ve always said that even to use a CC BY licensed song commercially, you have to buy a license from them. This is NOT true. CC BY grants you permission to use the track commercially without compensating the artist in ANY way besides providing attribution. And that’s not even the half of it! They also try to get you to buy licenses for ANY use besides home listening, even if it’s allowed by the CC license. In other words, they have downright lied to their users before.

    • http://torrentfreak.com/ Rob8urcakes

       If that’s accurate Chris, and I’ve no reason whatsoever to doubt you or think it is, then Jamendo quite simply needs to die a quiet and not necessarily painless death.

      I absolutely abhor rip-off companies who exploit their targeted customer-base by deliberately lying to them, and specially when they use such a noble, terrific and FREE service as CreativeCommons licensing =  Grrrrrr.

      • Mr R’Lyeh

         There are different types of CC licenses. Some variants permit commercial usage, others strictly forbid it.

    • Huddel

      This is not acurate, get your facts straight!
      1) CC content can be licensed blocking Non-Commercial (NC) and Non-Derivative (ND) as it can be seen here:  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ 2) What they do is that if you want to use songs that are licensed as NC and/or ND  for commercial and derivative purposes, they arranged a easy way to license the music directly for those purposes for a really cheap fee and unlimited use,

  • Jammartin

    That’s right, the CC licenses may not be properly displayed on the music pages: the is only Jamendo the first release of the new version, which will see a lot of improvements in the coming weeks.
    They just stated the following about CC:
    The Creative Commons license for each track is visible on the bottom of each track page, but as many users had difficulties locating them, we will move them so they are more clearly presented. Of course, Jamendo is and always was a platform where all content is under Creative Commons.

    http://blog.jamendo.com/2012/05/03/response-to-the-community/

  • Sddssd

    Fuck JAMENDO, they are in PUR(hadopi, see in pur.fr).

    • Huddel

      Dear sir or ma’am, 

      PUR is not a site of censorship backers, pur is a government site that list alternatives for finding, sampling, using, remixing and buying content. It’s the only decent thing the government did in the whole hadopi mess and it’s a shame it had to come together.

      To have a CC commons site be pointed by the government as a sensible and responsible use of licensing and a standing example of respecting the rights of artists and users offering free music with unlimited download is probably an honor.

      You should see that not as bad thing, but as a good one: the government is acknowledging the potential of the CC-license and of independant promotion and sharing platforms.

      Still, is not like jamendo asked to be included there, the government compiled the list by itself, I wish sometimes part of the userbase here didn’t acted so much on their emotions and acted more based on reason.

      There are things to be upset? Sure! But not everything is a matter of fighting the man, some are really just misunderstadings, and you’re jumping the gun.

  • BTGuard - BitTorrent Anonymously

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