Folktunes.org

Content is licensed under a Creative Commons By-nc-sa License, unless otherwise noted.

What does "some rights reserved" mean?

• Attribution. You must give the original author credit.
• Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
• Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.

The Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license applies to articles, images, and sound uploaded by the users of this site, and does not change the license status of things in the public domain. The general rule for folk tunes is that your recordings of them can be licensed as you choose, while the tune and lyrics remain in the public domain. This means a licenser can deny permission to alter his or her folk tune audio file, but cannot deny you the right to sing your own version (so "all rights" cannot be reserved).

This has been common sense and practice for thousands of years, but it helps to have it legally expressed for the purposes of the archive.