ORIGINAL: drillerman
2) You should be very careful when you call somebody a liar BlackAlpha. If we take a look at the Artem Bank website(h_ttp://artembank.bandcamp.com/album/star-ruler) we can see that the songs are free to download, but we can also see a symbol and a sentence at the bottom of the page which says:"all rights reserved". This is what Unforeseen was pointing at and that is the reason why is he saying that you should ask for the authors permission, because in this case you can download the song for free, but all the rights(distribution, performance, ...) are reserved to the artist.
Hmm, I think that's what I said.
Yes, that is what You said. It just took me so long to write my post that your managed to sneak in before I finished and sent mine.[:)]
ORIGINAL: BlackAlpha
All rights reserved doesn't actually mean much for copyright these days. Let me explain...
From Wikipedia:
"'All rights reserved' is a phrase that originated in copyright law as a formal requirement for copyright notice. It indicates that the copyright holder reserves, or holds for their own use, all the rights provided by copyright law, such as distribution, performance, and creation of derivative works; that is, they have not waived any such right. Copyright law in most countries no longer requires such notices, but the phrase persists. The original understanding of the phrase as relating specifically to copyright may have been supplanted by common usage of the phrase to refer to any legal right, although it is probably understood to refer at least to copyright."
Concerning copyright, it's basically outdated. Now, when you create something, it belongs to you with all the rights, unless you say otherwise (including though a contract, etc). But people prefer to still use it because it makes it harder for somebody else to "steal" their rights. It's basically what people use to avoid legal loopholes in certain countries that would nullify some of their rights.
So this doesn't change anything in the case of those specific Artem Bank soundtracks that he says are given away for free. It doesn't change anything for our purposes, at least. And to clarify, just because he's giving it away for free now, doesn't mean he's relinquishing any of his rights. He could change his mind and not make it free any longer and we'd need to obey his rules. We afterwards then wouldn't be able to say that "well, it was free, so now I'm going to sell it". He still owns the rights. But he still owns the rights even if he wouldn't have the "all rights reserved" notice. The "all rights reserved" notice can protect in certain cases against clever lawyers who in such scenarios would otherwise be able to steal his right to monetize his song, for example.
I hope that makes sense.
EDIT: About Artem Bank vs that Neuralknight example. If you intent to monetize their tracks, then you'd need to pay close attention to their rights/licenses. For our purposes this doesn't matter much since we are not making any money off it. Artem is basically making sure that he remains the owner of all the rights while giving his stuff away for free (you can see this by the wide usage of his music by "fans"). The other guy is relinquishing some of his rights entirely (probably because he doesn't care much about it). You generally need to state this on paper to make it happen in reality, hence his license. It's basically a different way of doing the same. They are basically doing the same as far as fans and non-profit is concerned, but they go about different ways of using the legal rules.
I read the wiki article before my first post, but I guess we just both understand it a bit differently.
