AGNULA Libre Music - for Free Music

Davide FUGAZZA and Andrea GLORIOSO Media Innovation Unit - Firenze Tecnologia Borgo degli Albizi 15 50122 Firenze Italy d.fugazza@miu.firenzetecnologia.it, a.glorioso@miu.firenzetecnologia.it

Abstract Nicola Bernardini organized a workshop in AGNULA Libre Music is a part of the larger AG- Firenze, Italy at the beginning of June 2001, NULA project, whose goal as a european–funded inviting an ever–growing group of support- (until April 2004) and as mixed private–volunteer ers and contributors (including: Marco Tre- driven (until today) project was to spread Free Soft- visani, G¨unter Geiger, Dave Phillips, Paul ware in the professional audio and sound domains; Davis, Fran¸coisD´echelle, Georg Greve, Stanko specifically, AGNULA Libre Music (ALM from now Juzbasic, Giampiero Salvi, Maurizio Umberto on) is a web–based datase of music pieces licensed 1 Puxeddu and Gabriel Maldonado). That was under a “libre content” license. In this paper An- the occasion to start the first concrete DeMuDi drea Glorioso (former technical manager of the AG- NULA project) and Davide Fugazza (developer and distribution, the venerable 0.0 alpha which was maintainer of AGNULA Libre Music) will show the then quickly assembled by G¨unter Geiger with technical infrastructure that powers ALM, its rela- help from Marco Trevisani. A bootable CD- tionship with other, similar, initiatives, and the so- version was then burned just in time for the cial, political and legal issues that have motivated ICMC 2001 held in La Habana, Cuba, where the birth of ALM and are driving its current devel- G¨unter Geiger and Nicola Bernardini held a tu- opment. torial workshop showing features, uses and ad- vantages of DeMuDi(D´echelle et al., 2001). Keywords On November 26, 2001 the European Com- AGNULA, libre content, libre music, Creative Com- mission awarded the AGNULA Consortium — mons composed by the Centro Tempo Reale, IR- CAM, the IUA-MTG at the Universitat Pom- 1 The AGNULA project — a bit of peu Fabra, the Free Software Foundation Eu- history rope, KTH and Red Hat France — with con- In 1998 the situation of sound/music Free Soft- sistent funding for an accompanying measure ware applications had already reached what lasting 24 months (IST-2001-34879). This ac- could be considered well beyond initial pio- companying measure, which was terminated on neeristic stage. At that time, the biggest prob- March 31st 2004, gave considerable thrust to lem was that all these applications were dis- the AGNULA/DeMuDi project providing sci- persed over the Internet: there was no common entific applications previously unreleased in bi- operational framework and each and every ap- nary form and the possibility to pay professional plication was a case-study by itself. personnel to work on the distribution. But when Marco Trevisani proposed (this After the funded period, Media Innovation time to Nicola Bernardini, G¨unter Geiger, Unit, a component of Firenze Tecnologia (itself Dave Phillips and Maurizio De Cecco) to build a technological agency of the Chamber of Com- DeMuDi (Debian Multimedia Distribution) an merce of Firenze) has decided to partly fund unofficial Debian-based binary distribution of further AGNULA/DeMuDi developments. Free sound/music Free Software, something hap- Ekanayaka2 is the current maintainer of the dis- pened. tribution.

1 AGNULA has constituted a major step in the This paper is °c 2005 Fugazza, Glo- direction of creating a full-blown Free Software rioso and Copyright °c 2005 Firenze Tecnologia. It is licensed under a BY- infrastructure devoted to audio, sound and mu- SA 2.0 License (see http://creativecommons.org/li- censes/by-sa/2.0/legalcode). [email protected]

LAC2005 141 sic, but there’s much more to it: it is the first proval,6 the zeitgeist was ripe with the “Com- example of a European-funded project to clearly mons”. specify the complete adherence of its results to A number of relevant academic authors from the Free Software paradigm in the project con- different disciplines had launched a counter– tract, thus becoming an important precedent for attack against what was to be known as the similar projects in the future (Bernardini et al., “new enclosure movement”, (Boyle, 2003): the 2004). attempt of a restricted handful of multinational enterprises to lobby (quite succesfully) for new 2 AGNULA Libre Music: copyright extension and a stricter application of sociopolitics neighbouring rights. On February 2003 Andrea Glorioso was ap- The result of this strategy on behalf of the pointed as the new technical manager of the multinational enterprises of the music business AGNULA project, replacing Marco Trevisani was twofold: on the one hand, annoying tens who had previously served in that position of thousands of mostly law–abiding consumers with silly lawsuits that had no chance of stand- but was unable to continue contributing to the 7 8 project due to personal reasons. ing in the court ; on the other hand, motivat- This is not the place to explain in detail how ing even more authors to escape the vicious cir- the new technical manager of the AGNULA cle of senseless privatization that this system project tackled the several issues which had to had taken to its extremes. be handled in the transition, mainly because of It seemed like a good moment to prove that the novelty of the concept of “Free Software” AGNULA really wanted to provide a service for the European Commission (a novelty which to its community, and that it really had its sometimes resulted in difficulties to “speak a roots (and its leaves, too) in the sort of “peer- common language” on project management is- to-peer mass production” (Benkler, 2002) that sues) and of the high profile of the project itself, Free Software allowed and, some would argue, both inside the Free Software audio community called for. After investing a major part of its — for being the first project completely based human and financial resources on creating the on Free Software and funded with european project management infrastructure for working money — and in the European Commission — on the two GNU/ distributions the project for being the first project completely based aimed to produce, it was decided that a web– on Free Software and funded with european accessible database of music would be created, money (Glorioso, ). and the music it hosted would be shared and made completely open for the community at The interesting point of the whole story — large. and the reason why it is cited here — is that the new Technical Manager, in agreement with Davide Fugazza was hired as the chief archi- tect and lead developer of AGNULA Libre Mu- the Project Coordinator (Nicola Bernardini, at 9 the time research director of Centro Tempo sic, which saw its light in February 2004. Reale) decided to put more attention on the 2.1 Libre Content vs Libre Software “social” value of project, making the life of What might be missing in the short history of the project more open to the reference com- ALM is that the decision to allow for the Eu- munity (i.e. the group of users and devel- ropean Commission funding to be spent on this opers gravitating around the so called LA* 3 mailing lists: linux-audio-announce, linux- 6 4 5 The reader should remember that AGNULA, being audio-users, linux-audio-dev ) as well as creat- a publicly financed project, had significant constraints ing an AGNULA community per se. on what could or could be done during its funded life- In September 2003, when the first idea of AG- time — the final decision and responsibility towards the European Commission rested in the hands of the Project NULA Libre Music was proposed to the Project Coordinator. Coordinator by the Technical Manager for ap- 7http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=- 20040205005057966 3 http://www.music.columbia.edu/mailman/list- 8In fact, it can be argued that the real strategic rea- info/linux-audio-announce son of these lawsuits had a marketing/PR reason rather 4http://www.music.columbia.edu/mailman/list- than substantial grounds, which does not make them less info/linux-audio-announce effective in the short term. 5http://www.music.columbia.edu/mailman/list- 9See http://lists.agnula.org/pipermail/a- info/linux-audio-announce nnounce/2004-February/000041.html

LAC2005 142 sub–project of the main AGNULA project was of assuring data integrity and the validation of not an easy one, for several reasons: all information according to the given specifica- tions. • The European Commission, as all large po- Registration is free (as in free speech and in litical bodies, is under daily pressure by free beer) and anonymous — the only request is 10 several different lobbies; the “all rights a valid e-mail address, to be used for automatic reserved” lobby, which is pressuring for and service communications. an extension of copyright length and of In the spirit of libre content promotion, no the scope of neighbouring rights, was par- separation of functionalities between “simple ticularly aggressive at the time the ALM users” and “authors” has been implemented: project was launched (and still is, by the both classes of users can benefit from the same way). This made financing a project, whose features: primary goal was to distribute content with flexible copyright policies, questionable in • Uploading and publishing of audio files the eyes of the EC (to say the least); with automatic metatag handling; • Software is not content in the eyes of the • Real–time download statistics; European Commission, which maintains • Creation of personalized playlist, to be ex- a very strict separation between the two 11 ported in the .pls and .m3u formats, them- fields in its financing programmes. Using selves compatibles with the majority of money originally aimed at spreading Free 13 14 players around (xmms, winamp (TM), Software in the professional audio/sound 15 iTunes (TM) ); domain to distribute content was poten- tially risky, albeit the reasons for doing so Other features which are available to anony- had been carefully thought out; mous users, too, are: • The licensing scheme which ALM applies, • mainly based on the Creative Commons li- A search engine with the possibility of censes,12, did not and does not map cleanly choosing title, artist or album; on the licensing ontology of Free Software. • RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures, to be used Although there are striking similiarities in with “podcasting” supporting clients;16; the goals, the strategies and the tactics of • For developers and for integration with Creative Commons Corporation, Free Soft- other services, ALM offers a SOAP (Group, ware Foundation and other organizations 2003) interface that allows queries to be re- which promote Free Software, not all the motely executed on the database; Creative Commons licenses can be consid- ered “Free” when analyzed under the lens 3.1 The web and tagging engine of “Software” (Rubini, 2004). This point is 17 discussed with more detail in section 4 ALM uses the PostgreSQL database as the back–end and the PHP language18 for its web– 3 AGNULA Libre Music: technique enabled frontend. PHP also handles a page tem- plating and caching system, though the Smarty To make a long story short, AGNULA Libre library. Music is a Content Management and online File uploading on the server is handled publishing system, optimized and specialized through a form displayed on users’ browsers; for audio files publication and management. first HTTP handles the upload on a temporary Registered users is given complete access to location on the server, and then a PHP script his/her own material. The system takes care copies the audio files to their final destination. 10Please note that in this paper the term “lobby” is It is in this phase that the MP3 or OGG Vorbis used with no moral judgement implied, meaning just a metags, if already available in the file, are read.

“pressure group” which tries to convince someone to ap- 13 ply or not apply a policy of a certain kind. See http://www.xmms.org/. 14 11It could be argues that, in the digital world, the See http://www.winamp.com/. 15 difference between data (“content”) and computer pro- See http://www.apple.com. 16 grams is rather blurred. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting. 17 12See http://creativecommons.org/about/li- See http://www.postgresql.org/. censes/. 18See http://www.php.net.

LAC2005 143 Besides, a form for the modification/creation of • Creative Commons Attribution 2.020 such tags is presented to the user. • EFF Open Audio License21 The system ask which license should be ap- plied to the files — without this indication files The overall goal was to allow for the broad- are not published and remain in an “invisible” est possible distribution of music, leaving to the state, except for the registered user who up- author the choice whether to apply or not a loaded them in the first place. “” clause (Stallman, 2002a) — i.e. that To avoid abuses of the service and the up- all subsequent modifications of the original work loading of material which has not been prop- should give recipients the same rights and duties erly licensed to be distributed, all visitors (even that were given to the first recipient, thus creat- anonymous ones) can signal, through a script ing a sort of “gift economy” (Stallman, 2002b), which is present in every page, any potential albeit of a very particular nature, possible only copyright violation to the original author. The thanks to the immaterial nature of software (or script also puts the file into an “invisible” status digital audio files, in this case). until the author either reviews or modifies the We chose not to allow for “non-commercial licensing terms. uses only” licenses, such as the various Cre- ative Commons licenses with the NC (Non 3.2 Metadata and license handling Commercial) clause applied. The reason for this To guarantee a correct usage of the files and choice are various, but basically boil down to the an effective way to verify licenses, the scheme following list: proposed by the Creative Commons project has • been adopted (Commons, 2004). Such scheme Most of the AGNULA team comes from the can be summarized as follows: Free Software arena; thus, the “non com- mercial” clause is seen as potentially mak- • using metagas inside files; ing the work non-free. Further consider- ations on the difference between software • using a web page to verify the license; and music, video or texts, and the different functional nature of the two sets would be ALM uses the “TCOP” Copyright tag, which in order here; but until now, an “old way” the ID3v2 metadata format provides (Nilsson, approach has been followed; 2000), to show the publishing year and the URL • It is extremely difficult to define what “non where licensing terms can be found. commercial” means; this is even more true This page, which lives on the AGNULA Libre when considering the different jurisdiction Music server, contains itself the URL of the Cre- in which the works will be potentially dis- ative Commons licensing web page; moreover, it tributed, and the different meanings that contains an RDF (Group, 2004) description of the term “commercial” assumes. Besides, the work and of the usage terms. what authors often really want to avoid is In this way it is possible: speculation on their work, i.e. a big com- pany using their music, but have no objec- • to verify the authenticity of the license; tion against smaller, “more ethical” entities 22 • to make it available a standardized descrip- doing so. However, “non commercial” li- tion to search engines or specialized agents; censing does not allow such fine–grained se- lection (Pawlo, 2004). 4 AGNULA Libre Music: legalities 5 Future directions 4.1 Licensing policy AGNULA Libre Music is far from reaching its AGNULA Libre Music has decided to accept the maximum potential. There are several key ar- following licenses to be applied on the audio files eas which the authors would like to explore; published and distributed through the system: 20 See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- /2.0/. • Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 21See http://www.eff.org/IP/Open licenses- 2.019 /20010421 eff oal 1.0.html. 22The decision of what constitutes an “ethical” busi- 19See http://creativecommons.org/licenses- ness vs a non–ethical one is of course equivalent to open- /by-sa/2.0/. ing a can of worms, and will not be discussed here.

LAC2005 144 moreover — and perhaps, much more interest- 6 Acknowledgements ingly for the reader — the AGNULA project As the reader may expect, projects such as AG- has always been keen to accept help and contri- NULA and AGNULA Libre Music are the re- butions from interested parties, who share our 23 sult of the common effort of a very large pool commitment to Free Software and circulation of motivated people. And indeed, giving credit of knowledge. to any deserving individual that contributed to More specifically, the ares which the ALM these projects would probably fill completely project is working on at the moment are: the space allotted for this paper. Therefore, we decided to make an arbitrarily small selec- • Integration with BitTorrent tion of those without whose help AGNULA and BitTorrent24 has shown its ability to act AGNULA Libre Music would not probably ex- as an incredibly efficient and effective way ist. First of all, we would like to thank Richard to share large archives (Cohen, 2003). AG- Stallman, without whose effort Free Software NULA Libre Music is currently implement- would not exist at all; , whose ing a system to automatically and regularly steadfast work on behalf of the Digital Com- create archives of its published audio files. mons has given justice to all the less known The ALM server will act as the primary persons that worked on the subject in unriper seeder for such archive. times. Special thanks go to Roberto Bresin and to the Speech, Music and Hearing department • Integration with Open Media Streaming of the Royal Institute of Sweden (KTH) for (OMS) hosting the main AGNULA Libre Music server. Open Media Streaming25 is Other people that deserve our gratitude are: Philippe Aigrain and Jean-Fran¸coisJunger, the European Commission officials that have been a free/libre project software for promoting the idea that AGNULA was a viable the development of a platform project against all odds inside the Commission for the streaming of multimedia itself; Dirk Van Rooy, later AGNULA Project contents. The platform is based Officer, Marc Leman and Xavier Perrot, patient on the full support of the stan- AGNULA Project Reviewers; Luca Mantellassi dard IETF for the real-time data and Giovanni Nebiolo, respectively President of transport over IP. The aim of the Firenze’s Chamber of Commerce and CEO of project is to provide an open solu- Firenze Tecnologia, for their support. tion, free and interoperable along with the proprietary streaming References applications currently dominant on the market.” Y. Benkler. 2002. Coase’s penguin, or, linux and the nature of the firm. The Yale Law Journal, 112. ALM is currently analyzing the necessary step to interface its music archive with N. Bernardini, D. Cirotteau, F. Ekanayaka, OMS, in order to have a platform com- and A. Glorioso. 2004. The agnula/demudi pletely based on Free Software and Open distribution: Gnu/linux and free software Standards to disseminate its contents. Be- for the pro audio and sound research do- Sound and Music Computing 2004 sides, OMS is currently the only streaming main. In , server which “understands” Creative Com- http://smc04.ircam.fr/. mons licensing metadata, thus enabling J. Boyle. 2003. The second enclosure movement even better interaction with ALM metatag and the construction of the . engine (De Martin et al., 2004). Law and Contemporary Problems, 66:33–74, Winter-Spring. 23It should be noted that Free Software Foundation B. Cohen. 2003. Incentives Europe holds a trademark on the name “AGNULA”; build robustness in bittorrent. the licensing terms for usage of such trademark clearly http://bittorrent.com/bittorrentecon.pdf, state that only works licensed under a license considered May. “free” by the Free Software Foundation can use the name “AGNULA”. Creative Commons. 2004. Using creative com- 24See http://bittorrent.com/. mons metadata. Technical report, Creative 25See http://streaming.polito.it/. Commons Corporation.

LAC2005 145 J.C. De Martin, D. Quaglia, G. Mancini, F. Varano, M. Penno, and F. Ridolfo. 2004. Embedding ccpl in real-time stream- ing protocol. Technical report, Politecnico di Torino/IEIIT-CNR. F. D´echelle, G. Geiger, and D. Phillips. 2001. Demudi: The Debian Multimedia Distribu- tion. In Proceedings of the 2001 International Computer Music Conference, San Francisco USA. ICMA. A. Glorioso. Project management, european funding, free software: the bermuda triangle? forthcoming in 2005. XML Protocol Working Group. 2003. Soap ver- sion 1.2 part 0: Primer. Technical report, World Wide Web Consortium. Semantic Web Working Group. 2004. Rdf primer. Technical report, World Wide Web Consortium. M. Nilsson. 2000. Id3 tag version 2.4.0 - main structure. Technical report. M. Pawlo, 2004. International Commons at the Digital Age, chapter What is the Meaning of Non Commercial? Romillat. A. Rubini. 2004. Gpl e ccpl: confronto e con- siderazioni. CCIT 2004. R Stallman, 2002a. Free Software, Free Soci- ety: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, chapter What is Copyleft? GNU Books, Oc- tober. R. Stallman, 2002b. Free Software, Free Soci- ety: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, chapter Copyleft: pragmatic idealism. GNU Books, October.

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