Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to expanding the range of creative works free to share and build upon, announced its new Music Sharing License and Get Content search engine at the South by Southwest Music Festival.

The license, which is available free of charge from the Creative Commons website, allows musicians to clearly mark their songs as free to download and share while protecting their commercial and other rights. The license also helps musicians tag their works digitally, which allows Creative Commons' Get Content search engine to index them from the web site.

This is the music-sharing notice bands can use to invite their fans to download and share their music noncommercially.

"Finally, musicians who want to share and fans who want legal downloads can find each other easily and quickly," said Neeru Paharia, Assistant Director of Creative Commons. "The Net already makes widespread distribution very easy - technically. The Music Sharing license, in combination with the new Get Content search engine, lets musicians harness the Net's distributive power while protecting themselves - legally."

Matthew King Kaufman, founder of Beserkley Records and MP34U.com, said: "If there's going to be legal p2p, then a Creative Commons Music Sharing license is a mandatory prerequisite."

Like all Creative Commons tools, the Music-Sharing License uses a three-layer interface to put fans on notice of the music's legal status. First is the Commons Deed, a plain-language summary of the legal language's key terms. Next is the Legal Code, the full copyright license in all its nitty-gritty detail (identical to the legal code for the Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivativeWorks license). Third is Creative Commons' metadata, a machine-readable expression of the license, so that users can search for and sort sharing-friendly music with the Get Content search engine, which indexes web pages carrying Creative Commons' license tags and metadata. The search engine is the first that allows users to find content based on the permissions and restrictions associated with it.

Music-Sharing License: http://creativecommons.org/license/music
GET CONTENT! Search Engine: http://creativecommons.org/getcontent/