Introducing SoundCloud Creative Commons Support

Today we are pleased to announce that SoundCloud just got full support for Creative Commons licenses. We feel the timing to launch CC license support is perfect since the CC 2008 fundraising campaign just launched (We’ve donated, have you?) and we’ve got BarCamp Berlin coming up this weekend. We’ll be a few guys from the Cloud at BarCamp hacking away and talking about audio on the web. Also, there’s a BarCamp opening party tonight at ZMF where the SoundCloud Dj duo Earthly Purpose will be playing a slow set from 19.00-23.00. Be there or be a square wave.

Also, you can drop CC licensed tracks in the BarCamp DropBox, and it will be played in the lounge during the weekend!

Now on to the fun stuff! The CC license support on SoundCloud is pretty straight-forward. You can pick a license when you upload a track, and you can set a default license in your settings. There are three main modes; All Rights Reserved, Some Rights Reserved, and No Rights Reserved. The default is All Rights Reserved, which means you own all rights to the works you upload.

You can also select the Some Rights Reserved-option which will give you a nice interface where you can assemble your Creative Commons license. You can select whether commercial use is ok, whether derivative works are ok, or whether derivative works should be “shared” alike, meaning derivative works should be shared under the same conditions. Read more about CC licenses here.

Lastly, there’s the No Rights Reserved-option if you want to let anybody do anything they like with your music.

A cool thing is that we’ve also got RDFa support so that all license information will be properly encoded for machine-reading directly in the track pages.

That’s it, now let’s make SoundCloud the best spot for publishing and finding CC licensed music on the web!