EFF proposes open-source music rights

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberty group that has emerged as one of the strongest critics of digital copyright law, is proposing a new music license that would let artists release songs on the Web and on Napster.

Dubbed the "Public Music License," the agreement is modeled partly after open-source software agreements, which let people freely distribute software code without payment or other royalties. The EFF says this idea will allow musicians to distribute their work online and win recognition without undermining the public's rights to fair use of the art. This type of license is unlikely to be taken up by most artists under contract to major music labels, who typically have assigned their digital distribution rights to the label.