7.4.2 EFF Open Audio License

Location: http://www.eff.org/IP/Open_licenses/eff_oal.php
Excerpts:
...``EFF's Open Audio License provides a legal tool ... providing freedom and openness to use music and other expressive works in new ways. It allows artists to grant the public permission to copy, distribute, adapt, and publicly perform their works royalty-free as long as credit is given to the creator as the Original Author.''...
``The aim of this license is to use copyright tools to achieve copyright's stated objectives of spreading knowledge and culture while preserving incentives for the author.''...
``Original Author irrevocably and perpetually grants to the public authorization to freely access, copy, distribute, modify, create derivative works from, and publicly perform the work released under this license in any medium or format, provided that Original Author attribution be included with any copies distributed or public performances of the work, as well as any derivative works based on the work, as further described below.''...
``Civil Liberties Unrestricted. Nothing in this license is intended to reduce, limit, or restrict any fair use, the first sale doctrine, or the public side of the copyright bargain under copyright law, or to in any other way limit any rights bestowed under consumer protection or other applicable laws.''...
Comments:

Advantages of the license:

• Freedom of use. Although, it is not directly expressed within the license, a work under it is not restricted to commercial or non-commercial use.
  
• Mandatory attribution to the author.
  
• It is not applicable to a rights holder that is not the author. However, sale of rights is not directly forbidden.
  
• The license text itself is not copyrighted, thus can be freely used to build new licenses upon it in all countries where copyright is not automatic. This means, you cannot fearlessly build another license upon it in the U.S.
  
• It relies not only on copyright laws (country unspecified), but on fair use, first sale and free speech doctrines and, supposedly, on all legalities behind thereof. On the other hand, it is important to remember that such legalities can be null and void in countries other than U.S. Regarding support of the freedom of speech, it is mentioned in the aims of the license developers, but not openly expressed in the ``Terms and Conditions of Use,'' section. They may have been implying it in the fragment ``...or other applicable laws,'' but since this is unclear, their backing of freedom of speech in this license is in question.
  

1. It is limited to a use in music related areas only.
   
2. It does not offer incentives to a publisher and sponsor of the work, and, consequently, limits the author's incentives.
   
3. There is a contradiction in the text, when the license grants perpetual rights to the public, while it can only last as long as copyright does.