About Copyright

Unless otherwise noted, all transcriptions and text — but not all audio and video recordings — on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This means that the work that we have done for the site is, to the extent possible by law, freely available for you to use however you want, as long as you give us attribution (a link back to https://slowerthandirt.org/ would be ideal, if possible) for the bits you use and as long as whatever work you incorporate ours into is also licensed under similar terms.

In practice, thanks to the murky state of copyright as it applies to music, this doesn’t mean an awful lot. If you want to do something with a transcription you find here, you’re still on your own for making sure it’s legal for you to do it. If it turns out that we didn’t get permission from a composer to publish a transcription of their tune here, our transcription being CC-licensed doesn’t mean that you can print our transcription in your book. It just means that we won’t be the ones coming after you for royalties and/or penalties. Even if we do get permission from a composer to publish one of their tunes here, that doesn’t necessarily mean you can record it on an album or perform it in public without paying them a royalty.

Audio and video files on this site should be assumed to be fully protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise stated. Recordings made for the site by the authors of themselves playing are licensed under the same Creative Commons license, and will be noted as such. Please note that this applies only to the recording itself, not to the underlying composition. If we’re playing a tune which is still under copyright then you won’t owe us any royalties for the performance, should you use it commercially, but you may owe royalties to the composer. It’s up to you to determine what the copyright status is of any piece you want to use, especially in a commercial context.

Neither of the creators of Slower Than Dirt is a lawyer. None of this is legal advice. For a canned rant about how the Copyright Act of 1976 outlawed folk music, talk to Josh.

If you’d like to use transcriptions or text from Slower Than Dirt but are unable to comply with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, please use the contact form to let us know what you’d like to do.

If you are a composer or musician whose intellectual property is being used here without permission, please let us know by using the contact form — we’d really like to know when something that we think of as “traditional” is actually a recent composition, so we can ask for permission and give appropriate credit or remove the tune as necessary.