Geometric Visions Poster Campaign: Support Creative Commons

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Geometric Visions
Poster Campaign

Please help promote Creative Commons music by printing and distributing my free music downloads poster.

I want my message of free music and Creative Commons to reach as many people as it can - even people who don't normally download music from the Internet, or who think music downloading is illegal or that one must pay for copy-protected music to avoid breaking the law. I want everyone to know that one can download enough free music to last a lifetime - and it's all legal too!

The Poster

Please print, snip and post
the right one for your paper size:

US Letter Color

The A4 and Black and White versions will be ready soon.

What I'm asking you to do is print out one of the Adobe Acrobat PDF posters in the box to the right, use scissors to cut between the tear-off strips at the bottom, then tack my poster to bulletin boards around your community.

Posting even one this way would help me significantly. But please post as many as you have the time and energy to do. My Circle Flower logo is in color, but if you want to save on color ink, you're welcome to print the black and white version instead.

There are even versions for both US Letter and A4 paper sizes so everyone's posters should come out properly formatted.

Why Should You Want to Help Me?

My album Geometric Visions has a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.5 license: not only are you free to download my music, to copy it to as many computers or portable players as you like, but you can burn CDs for your friends, and even share it over the Internet. Completely legally! Not just that, but the CC-AS 2.5 license permits derivative works, that is, you can make your own versions of my music, even a techno remix, provided you share alike: that is, you must use the same license for your own version.

(I'm working on writing down the scores to Geometric Visions in the Lilypond music engraving program, so soon other musicians will also be able to learn to play my songs, and other composers can make new arrangements based on my work. That is, provided that they share alike!)

If you don't believe there's a metric boatload of free music for you to download, all of it legal to copy and share, have a look at the music section of the Common Content Catalog, an index to creative works that have Creative Commons licenses.

Could There Be a Better Way?

Please read Should Copyright Even Exist? by Michael David Crawford.

The problem is, the big recording labels don't usually allow their artists to place their music under any sort of free license, Creative Commons or otherwise. If you want to download a track from a pop star who's signed with Sony music, you have to pay to download a copy-protected track from the iTunes Music Store or one of the paid download sites that distribute DRM-encumbered Windows Media files.

I think that's just plain wrong. The problem is, big businesses like Apple, Microsoft and Time Warner have a lot of money to spend on marketing, so their advertising juggernaut is able to create the impression in the public's mind that what they are doing is right, and that they offer the only kind of music that's legal to download.

The musicians who offer Creative Commons music are almost all unsigned or signed with Indie labels. We don't have a lot of cash to get the word out about our music, so we do it the best we we can, by offerring downloads of our music from our websites, by playing at Open Mics and biker bars, and by walking around town tacking up posters about our music.

Want to Join Me? Get Your Torrents Hosted!

That's how my torrents are hosted - if you host with Ogg Frog, I'll give you your own page similar to my Ogg Frog page, so you don't even have to have your own website to offer music downloads. If you do have a website, just link to your torrents at oggfrog.com. Music torrent hosting at Ogg Frog is absolutely free of charge: you don't pay even a penny in bandwidth charges, which can bankrupt musicians who try to host downloads on a website the regular way, via HTTP, if their music becomes unexpectedly popular.

If you want me to host your torrents, please follow the instructions for getting hosted at Ogg Frog. In particular, I'll need you to send me your music on compact disc via postal mail. That's because Ogg Frog offers Free Lossless Audio Codec (or FLAC) downloads. FLAC files are fully compact disc-quality, so I need to either rip them from your CD, or encode them from CD-quality WAV files that you provide. Whatever works for you.

Why Am I Doing All This?

It's a long story. To make it short, it has to do with how I was raised: I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up, and so I studied the lives of all the famous scientists and mathematicians: Pythagoras, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton and Einstein to name a few.

While things are changing, the spirit of scientific inquiry has always held that knowledge must be shared freely, by publishing discoveries in scientific journals. This spirit of scientific inquiry was one of my most deeply-held beliefs when I was a boy: that knowledge must be free.

For many reasons, although I got my Physics degree, science didn't work out for me as a career, and so I went to work as a computer programmer in California's Silicon Valley. But in the software business, knowledge isn't set free: most computer programmers have to sign draconian non-disclosure agreements, in which we agree we can be sued should we tell anyone about our employer's trade secrets.

I labored for almost twenty years under such conditions, but I was never happy about it. But I found that I was free to write about my own interests and knowledge without restriction. I was also free to share the music I composed and recorded myself. For several years I have placed much of my writing under Creative Commons licenses, and recently did so with my music as well.

It was a tough decision, but one I feel very good about. Setting my music free gave me the kind of clean, fresh feeling that comes from kicking a crack habit.

A little over a month ago, I quit my programming job, and now I earn my keep entirely through advertising published on my various websites. I'm making just barely enough to get by, but I can see how if I keep writing and playing my music, I'll do just fine.

And I don't have to answer to anyone's non-disclosure agreements ever again.

You see, it's not just that Information wants to be Free, but that one has a responsibility to create Free Information.

Geometric Visions Poster Campaign

I Need Your Help!