The "How and Why is your music Free?" Page

Why Give Your Music Away?

Our music is not necessarily "free" - it's worth whatever you are willing to pay for it. The tracks are licensed through Creative Commons, so they are free to download, copy, share and distribute. We hope that if you like our music, you will help support the band by buying the full version of our CD, or other band merchandise on our "Merch" page, or donate to us through this website. We hope that those of you who are filmmakers will like our music enough to ask us to use it as score or soundtrack for your movie, and possibly even throw us a buck or two for the use. But there are many other ways you can support bands like Jagged Spiral that don't involve buying merchandise.

You can come to our shows. You can tell other people about us. You can stay connected to what the band is up to on the band blog. You can be our friend on myspace, and add your favorite Jagged Spiral song to your myspace page so others can hear it. You can send us e-mails about what you like or dislike or leave comments on our blog. Most importantly you can spread the word. E-mail our mp3s to your weird cousin who listens to Death Metal. Write an online review about Jagged Spiral. Pass along our music to others through e-mail, your own website, or file-sharing programs like limewire and bittorrent. Write "I [heart] Jagged Spiral" on the cover of your Sociology book. Use the band picture as your desktop wallpaper. Spray paint the Jagged Spiral logo on buildings and overpasses, or on your neighbor's 1980 Camero. This kind of support means more to us than money.

What Is Creative Commons?

Jagged Spiral's music is licensed through Creative Commons. This is a licensing method invented in response to a copyright system that simply doesn't work anymore, especially for music and other media distributed over the internet.

The old-style, traditional copyright offered by the Library Of Congress worked fine for the old-style, traditional system of media distribution, back when music truly was a product. But the times have changed. Music distributed over the internet is NOT like a product on a shelf in a store. Downloading data from the internet is NOT the same as buying a CD. The RIAA swears that 'Downloading is Stealing' and they compare it to shoplifting [or worse, see picture on the right! LOL -Z], but have you Ever seen a shoplifted product instantly replaced with an exact copy for free? Is it even possible to 'steal' music that you can hear on an artist's myspace page at any time for free?

The old copyrighting system does not work anymore, and a man named Lawrence Lessig figured out what to do about it. He came up with a 'hack' for the existing copyright system, and you can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_commons. Basically, Creative Commons licensing is a version of the traditional copyright, where you can allow others to use and share your work under specific conditions.

License Details:

The specific license Jagged Spiral chose to release their work, "Days From Evil" was the Creative Commons Music Sharing License. This license is also called the Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license.

Under this license, anyone is allowed to Copy, Distribute and Transmit the music, under three conditions:

• Attribution - You must attribute Jagged Spiral as the author of these works. For example, if you rip our CD to mp3 files and distribute them, they must have the mp3 tag filled in with Jagged Spiral as the Original Artist. We would also appreciate it if the Copyright tag was filled in with a link to this page: http://www.jaggedspiral.com/ccverify.html
• Noncommercial - You are not allowed to sell our works, or use them for commercial purposes without our permission. For example, if you would like to use our music to score a movie you intend to sell, you must have our permission first.
• No Derivative Works - You are not allowed to alter, transform or build upon these works. For example, you cannot sample any recognizable part of any song and use it in another song without our permission.

So, you can burn copies of the CD and hand it out to all your friends. (And we wish you would!) You can rip the CD, and post the files to limewire, gnutella, e-mule, or bittorrent. (Please!) But please don't try to sell our work, change it, or use it for commercial purposes without our permission.

License Verification:

Below are the legitimate license files for each Jagged Spiral song. I don't think they mean anything at all to human beings...

• The file 01 Forced Entry.mp3 identified by urn:sha1:S26WOYJ37N3FP3JCBIOJ4MVMV226B4Z6 is licensed to the public under the Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license.

If you read this far, you are a true fan. -Z