[cc-community] Music Sites Strip CC License Metadata

Michael David Crawford michael at geometricvisions.com
Tue Apr 22 16:47:40 EDT 2008


I was very distressed to find last night that music hosting site 
http://www.thesixtyone.com/ stripped the Creative Commons license 
metadata from the tracks that I uploaded there a few days ago.

Just for kicks I downloaded one of my own tracks to test ccLookup - and 
it said "no embedded license; nothing to verify".

To investigate this further, I found a command line program called id3v2 
that will dump out all of a file's tags.  What I found was that my 
tracks at thesixtyone had only id3v1 tags - the version two tags were 
entirely removed, not just the license tags.

I sent a request to help at thesixtyone.com to ask them to correct this 
problem.  But I expect they're not going to do it right away.  I'd like 
to request that someone from the Creative Commons office apply a little 
gentle pressure until they comply.

Also I suggested that they ought to display license notices next to all 
the tracks on the site that are CC-licensed - not just mine.

A further problem is that thesixtyone adds tags of its own.  That will 
break the sha1 hash that's used by ccLookup to verify a license.

I checked also at MySpace and Fuzz (http://www.fuzz.com/).  Fuzz also 
removes the v2 tags - but MySpace doesn't, and in fact didn't alter my 
file at all!  I'm surprised by that, because I've found MySpace's web 
software to be pretty buggy.

Here's what my license tags should be:

TCOP (Copyright message): 1994 Michael David Crawford. Licensed to the
public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ verify at
http://www.geometricvisions.com/music/license.html

WCOP (Copyright/Legal infromation):
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

WOAF (Official audio file webpage):
http://www.geometricvisions.com/music/license.html

To dump a file's tags, you need to build and install id3lib first, then 
build and install id3v2:

http://id3lib.sourceforge.net/
http://id3v2.sourceforge.net/

Usage: id3v2 --list Example.mp3

Here are my pages at each site - extra credit if you submit a friend 
request at each one!:

http://www.myspace.com/michaeldavidcrawford
http://michaeldavidcrawford.fuzz.com/
http://www.thesixtyone.com/profile/#/MDCrawford/

At MySpace, only my fourth track "As Yet Untitled" has the license tags. 
  I uploaded a new version just now.  I encoded my MP3s quite a long 
time ago, and found that the version of ccPublisher I tried at the time 
would corrupt my files.  This seems to have since been fixed.

Best,

Michael David Crawford
michael at geometricvisions.com
http://www.geometricvisions.com/

    Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.


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