Vinyl & Data

It's time for a very short post. In the last few days I spent some more time digging into Creative Commons licensed releases in the Discogs database. In a previous post I already looked a bit into it, but it was far from complete and likely I missed a few releases that have content under Creative Commons, but that I didn't identify. One thing that I added to my scripts recently was to look for a very specific word that is used in many Creative Commons license statements, namely ShareAlike . I added this to my scripts , grabbed the latest datadump (which is newer than the one I used last time, and also contains data added in November 2017) and reran my scripts. The result is that I found 82 more releases than last time. It should be noted that in one release the Creative Commons statement was actually removed and 31 releases seem to be new. That leaves around 50 releases which have the ShareAlike statement, but which I didn't recognize before as a released licensed und...

While digging through releases in Discogs I spotted that some of them had a reference to a Creative Commons license . As I am dealing with open source licensing (of software) on a daily basis it of course immediately drew my attention and I started to wonder how many of the releases in the Discogs database have a reference to Creative Commons. I (again) grabbed the latest data dump from Discogs (which itself is under a CC0 license, so quite fitting), and adapted my scripts to report if there were any references to Creative Commons in either the free text fields, the notes or in some of the descriptions in the "Barcode and Other Identifiers" (BaOI) sections and found 7884 releases. I plotted the results of the release numbers, which you can see below (first bar: release number 1 - 999,999, second bar release number 1,000,000 - 1,999,999, and so on): Distribution of possibly CC-licensed works in the Discogs database What strikes me is that for older releases there are...