# The rights chain, read at the source

The article says we verified the licence chain rather than trusting a label on a
file. This is that verification, with its receipts.

## What the recordings are

**Musopen — The Complete Chopin Collection**, from the *Set Chopin Free*
crowdfunding campaign (2013). Musopen is a non-profit; the campaign paid for
newly commissioned performances specifically in order to give them away.

Two layers have to be clear of copyright for this to work, and they are cleared
by different mechanisms:

- **The composition.** Chopin died in 1849. The music has been out of copyright
  for over a century, everywhere.
- **The recordings.** This is the layer that is normally the licensing problem,
  because a new performance of a public-domain work carries its own fresh
  copyright. Musopen's campaign dedicated the commissioned performances to the
  public domain under **CC0 1.0**.

## The licence quote, verbatim

From the campaign's own FAQ, answering its own question:

> What license will the music recordings be released under? Like all the
> previous music we released, we will be using Creative Common's CC0
> dedication, a public domain dedication:
> http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

The FAQ page carries its own last-updated stamp of Friday, September 6, 1:59am
(US Eastern), which is the page state the quote was read from.

## Where it was read, and why not from the live site

    http://web.archive.org/web/20131003061056/http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/Musopen/set-chopin-free

**Read 2026-08-27T18:55Z**, from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

It was read from a snapshot rather than the live page because the live
crowdfunding site answers any client that is not a browser with **HTTP 403** —
verified twice, at 18:54Z and 18:55Z on 2026-08-27. We do not disguise our tools
as browsers to get around that, so the snapshot is the honest read, and the
article says so in its own words.

## Where the files came from

The audio was downloaded from the Internet Archive item `musopen-chopin` on
2026-08-29, between 15:10:42Z and 15:12:18Z. Every per-file source URL is in
`corpus-manifest.tsv` beside its sha256, so any file can be re-fetched and
re-hashed against what we trained on.

## One standing rule this read produced

**An aggregator's licence *facet* is not a licence.** The Internet Archive's CC0
facet returns items whose own pages contradict the facet, so a facet was never
accepted as a licence here. Every intake is read at the pen — the rights holder's
own words about their own work — or it is not intaken. That rule is why this
chain is three links (composition · commissioning project's own FAQ · the item
that holds the files) rather than one checkbox.

## What is NOT claimed

- **Per-track performer attribution is unverified.** The campaign describes the
  performers as "students at some of the best conservatories in the world,
  professors, professional pianists, and recording artists"; only 2 of the
  collection's files carry an `artist` tag. CC0 imposes no attribution
  obligation, so nothing here depends on it — but it is written down rather than
  left to look settled.
- The generated clips on the article page are **not** Chopin recordings and are
  not CC0 by inheritance. They are machine-generated audio, and the page says so
  beside every player.

## Credit, freely given

CC0 is a dedication that demands no credit, which is exactly why we give it:
these recordings exist because a non-profit raised money to buy them for
everybody. None of them owed us anything.