Reply To: Caleb’s JoCo Covers/Arrangements
Absolutely — you are permitted to get the source tracks for free. That’s part of the whole Creative Commons thing. In fact, under his licensing you can technically get almost all of his material for free.
This is “stealing” only in an ethical sense, not a legal sense, and I think of it as “try before you buy.” Personally, I’ve paid him for all his tracks, multiple times in fact, since I’ve bought all of them digitally, some again on CD, and also purchased his flash drives… and seen him live three times, taking a couple friends with me. I’ve also loaned folks the flash drive so they can listen to his material, telling them about his licensing arrangement, and leaving it up to them if they want to pay him.
If you’re a poor student and can’t afford to pay him, the least you could do would be to pass copies on to all your friends and tell them to pass it on too — you’ll introduce him to a wider audience, and probably at least some of them will pay him something, or go to a show, or buy a t-shirt.
In fact, JoCo does not actually sell the source tracks on his site or via an album in the normal way, so even if you wanted to pay for them as such, you couldn’t. He was selling a limited edition USB key as a fundraiser for Creative Commons that included his JoCo Looks Back album and the source tracks, but I don’t think those are available any more. Also, at some shows he was selling a USB key with a cartoon of his face on it, which has pretty much his whole discography and I think also included the source tracks.
Honestly, if you download the source tracks for free, don’t pay JoCo a dime, but make something cool with it also under the CC license, and get it noticed, and people like it, and it gets them noticing the original work and artist — you’ve paid him!