I spotted (via KairosNews) that Wired magazine has put together a CD of music with a Creative Commons Licence (see the details on Wired's web site.)

In general, I think this is a pretty neat idea, and I will certainly look hard at using this music for some of my own audio and video projects. For the moment, though, it seems much more of a publicity stunt by Wired than a really useful attempt at sharing. Let's look at a few reasons why:

• The music is apparently free to share, but there are no links to download it from the Wired web site (not even via BitTorrent, which would seem ideally suited to this sort of thing.) In the end I found the tracks on a P2P service, so I'm downloading them as we speak, but I don't know a way to provide you with a Gnutella or eDonkey URL...
• The article vaguely mentions that some of the tracks are licenced for commercial use, but others are non-commercial only, but they don't say which. This leaves me unsure what I can legally do with these tracks. There is probably more licencing "small print" on the physical CD, but I don't have access to that.
• As far as I can tell, the CD simply contains raw audio tracks, with no associated metadata. The tracks will most naturally be shared in a format such as MP3. But, MP3s formed by "ripping" the audio from the CD rarely have any sensible metadata. I've just checked one that has completed downloading from the P2P system, and it has the bare minimum of track name and a combioned artist/album field. No licence terms, let alone more useful information such as search/classification keywords or author and version information.

It seems to me that for "Creative Commons" licencing to work, the licence needs to accompany the item being shared. In the world of software we are all used to finding some sort of README file bundled in with the distribution, or a "click-through" licence agreement on installation. Without an accompanying licence, though, legal sharing quickly decays into "but I thought I could use it..." which benefits nobody.

So the bottom line is a good publicity catch by Wired and the savvy artists who participated, but not quite a serious attempt at sharing.

Anyone got the CD and wants to put proper MP3s with sensibly populated metadata on a BitTorrent URL so we can all link to it?