[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.
More information about the cc-community
mailing list