MP3 Metadata and CC Licensing

I’m escalating this one from a comment to a post of its own. Malte brought up the importance of the metadata in MP3s, which a search on the term “metadata” in the form on the right of the webpage will show that this is a drum I’ve been beating for years. I don’t know how many times I have pleaded for Christopher Lydon to fill out the tags of his interview MP3s – here, in email to him, in the comments of his weblog – all to no avail. I’m trying to do right by the metadata of my audioblog MP3s. Because of feedback from head Groadie, the mysterious Jonny X I have even added individual descriptive show titles for each epsiode. I fill out the title, artist, album (with the URL) and I’m thinking about just putting keywords into the comments field each episode. I’m not going to do this retroactively for anything, at least not for anything still in the RSS feed, because I don’t want anyone who is using a download system based on mirroring to get all the old episodes down again when they change on the server.

Also, starting this episode I am committed to consistently embedding Creative Common licensing in each file. You are explicitly granted permission to propagate the files via P2P or any other non-commercial means, to excerpt in your own audioblogs (in fact, when Adam does it I get a big kick out of it), remix or do whatever you like in the form of derivative works. You can’t sell it, you are required to attribute my portion to me and tell me about it, you have to be “sharing alike” under compatible terms but other than that have at it. I promise not to get stroppy about it. If anyone out there has any of the MP3 file license validation machinery, I’d appreciate if you’d fire it up on my September 2 audioblog entry and let me know if it worked. I tried to put up the webpage for validating the license and I just want to make sure it works. I don’t have any of that horsepower myself.

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Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.