On 10/30/19, 3:10 PM, "Hans Åberg" <haber...@telia.com> wrote:
> On 30 Oct 2019, at 18:48, Carl Sorensen <c_soren...@byu.edu> wrote:
>
>> In general this is legally impossible; copyright law does not give you
any say in the use of the output people make from their data using your
program. If the user uses your program to enter or convert her own data, the
copyright on the output belongs to her, not you. More generally, when a program
translates its input into some other form, the copyright status of the output
inherits that of the input it was generated from.
>>
>> So the only way you have a say in the use of the output is if
substantial parts of the output are copied (more or less) from text in your
program. For instance, part of the output of Bison (see above) would be covered
by the GNU GPL, if we had not made an exception in this specific case.
>>
>> You could artificially make a program copy certain text into its output
even if there is no technical reason to do so. But if that copied text serves
no practical purpose, the user could simply delete that text from the output
and use only the rest. Then he would not have to obey the conditions on
redistribution of the copied text.
>
> This says to me that you can consider LSR snippets as part of the code
used to create music (any music, not just your specific music). You can then
put your specific music in a separate file, with separate copyright. And the
modified LilyPond (including the LSR snippets) is a derivative work of
LilyPond, and has GPL rights, and you would be required to share all of that
code. But the created music engraving (pdf, svg, or midi) is not a derivative
work of LilyPond, but an output of the program lilypond, and cannot be
restricted by the GPL, according to the FSF.
The snippets should be LGPL for being includable under other licenses, I
believe, because the processed part remains in the output, and thus
copyrightable. Thus, they play the same role as the Bison skeleton file and GCC
libraries.
What processed part remains in the output?
Carl
