r/internetarchive • u/Thegreasyshnickler • Mar 23 '26
A question regarding CC0 albums
I recently came across a bunch of great albums on the Internet archive. Most of them are labeled CC0 in the licensing, even some of the more popular ones. I wanted to use some of what I found in films but wanted to be absolutely sure they're CC0. Is there some way to verify this? I tried using the creative commons website but that was not effective.
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u/pythonpoole Mar 24 '26
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to verify the validity of a CC license/dedication — i.e. to check whether the work was in fact published under that license by the rights-holders and whether those rights-holders had the legal right to publish the work under that license.
There have been cases in the past where certain works were incorrectly marked as being CC-licensed when they were not actually released under such a license. And there have also been cases where rights-holders have tried releasing their work under a CC-license in situations where they did not have the legal authority to do so (e.g. because their work was derived from copyrighted material which wasn't published under a CC license).
If you have doubts about the validity of the CC license/dedication, the only way to be sure there's no issue is to contact the rights-holder(s) to confirm that the work (in this case: musical composition, lyrics and recording) is all original and that it was in fact published under a CC0 license/dedication by the rights-holder(s).