[asterisk-users] On-Hold Music

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 09:09:25AM +0000, Roger Burton West wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 04:37:49PM -0600, Danny Nicholas wrote:
> >            In 500 words or less (if possible), please explain what is a
> >legal music-on-hold file?
> 
> One source of explicitly royalty-free music is the podcasting community:
> http://uhort.no/ and http://www.podsafeaudio.com/ both have extensive
> libraries.

Please double-check. I could not figure things from uhort.no, and
podsafeaudio.com seemed partially down, but at least the one artist I
did look at there licensed his work under the terms of CC-NC (actually
version 2.0 of it) - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

Any Non-Commercial member of the CC family will not allow you a usage in
a cemmercial PBX. I'm not sure about any setup that is "non-commercial",
as using a file for MoH may be considered public performance[1]. Surely
you may be able to renogetiate other terms directly with the artist. But
then you don't rely on the existing license.

If you have content licensed under the terms of a CC license that does
not prevent non-commercial use (CC-BY-SA or whatever), you should
probably be OK[1].

There was another issue raied in a separate post: what if the author
changes their mind later? Well, the CC licenses are irrivocable (just
like the GPL). Unless the music was not his to license (was copied from
elsewhere), you should be safe if you have it properly licensed.

[1] As already noted, I'm not a lawyer. I may actually get some legal
issues right. But then again, maybe not.

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen
icq#16849755              jabber:tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com
+972-50-7952406           mailto:tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com
http://www.xorcom.com  iax:guest at local.xorcom.com/tzafrir