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Free Culture

iTMS and CC (via cc-community, edited)

It would be great if there was a CC metadata plugin for iTunes. I don’t know how open the iTunes APIs are, though. Perhaps Apple could add it, it wouldn’t take much work (surely?) and would help with their record-company-placating DRM by showing what rights are reserved.

The rumour grapevine has it that Apple will allow the next version of “Garage band” to publish tracks via iTMS. It would be great if they would let you CC-license work to be sold. There are already CC-licensed music repositories (opsound) and record labels (loca, opsound). If iTunes allowed you to search iTMS by CC license type and metadata, that would take it even further.

Since Apple really don’t really make any money on iTMS sales, they should allow CC-licensed work to be sold. Indeed they should encourage it, as it will drive sales of garageband and iPods, which is the whole point of iTMS.

iTMS, garage Band and iTunes could provide a user-friendly GUI for buying, creating, hosting and listening to CC-licensed content, searchable and manageable by CC metadata. Since iTMS is a legal fig-leaf for selling iPods, it doesn’t matter what kind of content iTMS sells as long as it doesn’t upset the record labels. CC-licensed content is still copyrighted and doesn’t challenge anyone’s rights, so how could they object? 😉

The only problem is iTMS’s DRM, which breaks the CC licenses. Whether Apple or the record labels would accept that artists who license their work CC are within their rights to request no DRM is another matter entirely.