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LOCA Records

Loca Records is an independent British record label based in Brighton that releases music under Copyleft licenses onto Vinyl, CD and tape. Inspired by GNU/Linux, Loca Records allows similar freedoms as the GNU General Public License on their releases, including copying, re-release, modification and sampling, with the requirement that the new work uses the same license.

Loca releases electronica and post-rock music. Artists include Meme, Maz Plant Out, Ward, and Xan.

Loca's first and second release in 1999, Kinematic and the Mandibles EP, were released under the GNU General Public License and subsequent releases have been on the EFF Open Audio License. Loca is now releasing all work under the Creative Commons license known as Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike.

One notable difference between this license and open-source licenses such as the GPL is that it does not require making the raw unmixed tracks available, whereas open source software has the underlying source code available.

Loca receives money from selling CDs and Records. Following the example of Free/Libre and Open Source GNU/LINUX distributors, this money is reinvested in new talent and to encourage more experimentation.

There are two types of releases:

i . Music CDs - These are the CDs bought in the shops. These are free to be copied, resold and sampled and resampled. However they do not contain the source files which was used to make the music. So although they are Copyleft and Open Music in as much as they can be copied and resold, they are not truly open source...

ii . Music/Data CDs - These contain both the music and a hidden computer readable area that will hold the samples and music tracks used to make up the songs. These can be used as above but also allow the user to remix, reedit and completely change the songs because you have the music source-code.

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