I’ve just changed the licence on every Fit and the Conniptions release to CC BY-NC-SA.

A couple of days ago, Dan Lynch played one of the tunes from Sweet Sister Starlight on Rathole Radio.

Looking at the blog post going with the podcast, I noticed that all the other Creative Commons licensed music was BY-NC-SA. I had licensed mine as BY-NC-ND - No Derivatives, rather than Share Alike - but I’d also stupidly forgotten to put that on the CD I’d sent him, so Dan quite reasonably noted that my tune was played ‘by permission’.

We exchanged a couple of emails on the subject of licensing, during which I realised that I hadn’t properly thought through the implications of using the BY-NC-ND licence. My idea was that if someone wanted to use or remix anything of mine, they would have to contact me, whereupon I would say yes and, in the case of a remix, offer to help by providing stems etc. In practice, sadly, this has not happened. Instead the ND part of the licence has meant that anyone wanting to take advantage of the CC licence in their own CC licensed project - whether a film, podcast, remix or anything else - has been slightly discouraged from doing so.

That’s not the idea at all.

One of the advantages of the CC licence is supposed to be the way in which similarly licensed projects can freely contribute to one another in a mutually supporting way. If anyone wants to use anything of mine in a CC project - and I’d be delighted if they did - I should make it as easy as possible for them to do so. As I now understand it, the SA bit of the licence does that; the old ND bit did not.

I hope this makes sense.

In other news, I am now entirely unsure how I want to spell the various forms of the word ‘licence’. It now looks wrong to me whether I use the ‘c’ or the ‘s’.

Oh well.