Hi,

It seems that some music hosting sites strip Creative Commons licensing
metadata from the tracks submitted to them. I've verified this with
http://www.fuzz.com/ and http://www.thesixtyone.com/ Quite
surprisingly, MySpace preserves it.

If any of your music is Creative Commons licensed, and should have the
license metadata, I'd like you to download your own tracks from any
music sites it's on, and check for the metadata with ccLookup.

If you place any of your music under a Creative Commons license, you can
use a program called ccPublisher to add license tags to your tracks, as
well as generate markup you can place on your website that can be used
for verification.

You can see mine here:
http://www.geometricvisions.com/music/license.html

You can download ccPublisher from:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcPublisher

You (or your fans) can use ccLookup to verify the license metadata found
in a file. What it does is compare the license notice found in your
track's id3 tags to the license notice found on your website.
You can get it from:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcLookup

There seems to be a bug in ccLookup, in that it can't verify licenses
marked by the latest version of ccPublisher. There's a new version of
ccLookup in development that fixes it, but it's not released yet.

Despite the bug, if the metadata is present in your MP3, ccLookup will
just say "Working...".

If there's no license in the file at all, ccLookup will say "No embedded
license; nothing to verify."

The main problem seems to be that Fuzz and thesixtyone both remove id3v2
tags from your tracks; they only keep version one tags.

A further problem that can prevent ccLookup from verifying a track is
that some sites add their own tags to your tracks. That will break the
sha1 checksum that ccLookup uses to determine which track is being verified.

So if any of your music is CC-licensed, please check your tracks at each
site that hosts your music, and let me know which ones do the right
thing, and which don't.

I'll pass your results on to the cc-community mailing list.

Thanks!

Michael David Crawford
mischael [delete -  @ -  this] geometricvisions.com
http://www.geometricvisions.com/