NOTHING SACRED: Common Interests

Online, I find myself intrigued by the new Creative Commons concept, at . I'm intrigued, in part, because it seems few of us dancers know the copyright and music performance laws, or the ongoing changes to same. That's a subject of another article, but it behooves any public performer to read up, either via your local library or online, about these laws. It also behooves you to pay attention to the changes to copyrigth law being implemented right under our noses. It doesn't affect our dance music, right this moment. But I know a few of us listen to Arabic radio online, because it's not at all available locally. We use our PC's to edit music for our shows, because we need just a section of a piece. And we're losing that right, piece by legislative piece. Creative Commons offers one small way around this, by making it very, very easy for people to make works available for the general public to use with limited restrictions. Once place this can be useful is for dancers and musicians who want to make a splash in the field. Putting your choreography or musical piece out there for the world to use -- all attributed to you -- is free advertising. Freely-offered, and impressive, choreographies can lead to seminar teaching offers. If you're a musician, know that dancers producing videos would be more than willing to share credits for the right to use your music in one place, credits you can parley into CD sales for your other music. Are there holes in these ideas? Sure. But, in the quest to think outside the box, it's worth looking at. Music and Dance have everything in the open to begin with. To me, there is little to lose, and much in the way of name recognition and free advertising to gain. ======================================== This is an idea whose time still hasn't come. The loss of mp3.com was a major blow to such a concept, as it does require some serious bandwidth. But there still is that major need for music that one can use without a guilty conscious. If we are to create a raqs infrastructure, one that's self-supporting and able to pay its top people what they deserve, we need to start thinking about how that's going to happen. Just as with Linux, something that's done for fun, and given freely, can make you a great deal of money, if you're talented at it. FYI, this whole weblog is under a CC license. I'm putting my money where my mouth is...