NC-SA Bops

Hey all,

Just making a quick announcement about the plans for this community, as well as giving some transparency about a post I deleted last night, as the two are tied together, and I feel it would be best to address both in one go.

So last night I deleted a post I made a few weeks ago sharing this song, which was a nice Complextro track that I heavily enjoyed. Reason being is that if one looks at the licensing terms, it gives an asterisk next to the Noncommercial point, stating that details can be discussed if one wishes to use the song for commercial purposes.

I feel that while the song showcases that it is BY-NC-SA via the Commons Deed, that the spirit of the deed is not being adhered to with this exception. I found last night in trying to find new music to share from Newgrounds that this is a very common exception for uploads to the site. On top of this, tracks from Newgrounds can also not follow the spirit of the BY-NC-SA license in the opposite direction, being more restrictive in only allowing noncommercial use if the music is used for webgames and animations, and requiring artist permission for other uses.

As this community is hosted on a PieFed instance, I have been meaning to utilize the wiki feature for some time now in order to create a guide for means to find new music that adheres to the values of the community and the BY-NC-SA license. For example, I have recently discovered a method of finding good BY-NC-SA music via BandCamp, and wish to share it with others here so that they can find and share BY-NC-SA music that they personally enjoy.

I also want to point out certain genres of music that are harder to work with, for what reasons that's the case, and on what specific platforms that's an issue if applicable. Examples include personal favourite genres of mine such as Frenchcore and Mashcore, which often remixes of one or multiple songs that don't use the BY-NC-SA license, or Country music, which has a unique issue on SoundCloud of having unlabelled AI-generated content that a trained ear can catch.

While I will continue to try and post music daily to this community to keep it active, if posts slow down, I want to make it clear and transparent that the community is NOT dead. The slowdown will be because of work being done on the community's wiki in order to help future members of the community find music that adheres to the spirit of the license, and showcase to people wanting to change their listening habits based on license type that it is possible to make change with the proper tools and knowledge.

Please let me know your thoughts here. As stated before, I want to build a community here, and don't want this to be a space which is molded by one person. If you feel that I'm being too restrictive regarding posts, or have any other concerns regarding the community that you wish to voice, I want to hear them.

Cheers!

While no songs posted to date have been AI-generated, I feel this is a necessary post to make considering my personal experience trying to find music to post here.

I have been trying to find country music tracks to post here since I'm trying to avoid over-saturating the community with electronic music despite that being my personal go-to genre. In trying to find tracks from SoundCloud, I've discovered a lot of tracks licensed as BY-NC-SA there that are AI-generated.

Now thankfully majority of these tracks the musicians are transparent about their use of AI, though one egregious example is giving the impression that they're locking comments if it's pointed out since it's not showcased anywhere on their profile. Putting my personal thoughts on AI aside, the past few days I've been wondering if in the future, AI-generated tracks should be allowed to be posted in this community.

I came to the conclusion that, no, AI-generated tracks should not be allowed in the community for the following reasons:

1. We have no way of telling the copyright status of the dataset used for the song's generation. The song could have been generated using data from traditionally copyrighted tracks, meaning that the generated content would be in violation of copyright.

2. Assuming it was possible to tell that the generated track's dataset was entirely based on BY-NC-SA music, the current status of Creative Commons licenses does not include options to protect musicians from having their music used for AI content generation. In my mind, once again putting personal thoughts on AI aside, considering that AI-generated music is a relatively new development, it is likely that a large amount of musicians would not be comfortable with their music being used for training AI even if the license they released their music under technically allows for that (the BY-NC-SA license coming before the advent of AI-generated music ofc).

3. The question of one being able to tell what an AI-generated song is derivative of comes into question. Assuming we could tell the dataset was entirely BY-NC-SA music, and that all the musicians involved somehow were comfortable with their music being used for AI music generation, how would a listener be able to tell what the song is derivative of? Perhaps this might be a moot point with it already being a hassle to determine the sources of samples in some music or if samples were used at all, but it could also exacerbate this problem that's currently often faced.

Please feel free to let me know your thoughts and whether you agree or disagree with this new rule. I would love to hear what the community in general thinks, and will consider all feedback given.

May contain copyright samples.