PickiPedia:Creative Commons

A Creative Commons licence is one the people who made a recording chose, in advance, to let you use it: to copy it, pass it to somebody, play it on the radio, learn it note for note and put your own version out. Some ask that you credit them; some ask that what you make be shareable in turn. None of them require you to ask first.

PickiPedia treats that as worth saying out loud. A musician's page lists the records they played on under a heading naming this, and a record that is not under such a licence is listed separately, below — see Template:In the studio and Template:Other studio work.

That ordering is a claim about what this wiki is for. A recording you can pass to somebody is worth more here than one you can only point at.

What the badge means

The licence beside a record is the one recorded on the record's own page, written as its own name: CC BY-SA 4.0, CC0. It is shown rather than flattened to a yes-or-no, because which licence it is matters to somebody deciding what they may do with it — whether they must credit, whether they must share alike.

Where no licence is recorded, the record is listed as other work. Unknown is not the same as unfree, but treating it as free would be a claim nobody has checked.

The licences you will see here

• CC BY — use it, credit the maker.
• CC BY-SA — use it, credit the maker, and licence what you make from it the same way. The records on this wiki are mostly this.
• CC0 — the maker gave up their claim entirely.
• Public domain — nobody holds a claim, usually because it is old enough.

Creative Commons also publishes licences with NC (non-commercial) and ND (no derivatives) in their names. They are still Creative Commons licences and are treated as such here, but they are narrower: ND in particular forbids the arrangement, the cover, the remix — which is most of what musicians do with each other's work.

Recording a licence

On the record's page, in {{Record}}:

{{Record
|artist  = Justin Myles Holmes
|license = CC BY-SA 4.0
}}

Only record what you have actually checked. A licence is a statement about somebody else's rights, and guessing at it here would put words in their mouth.