On Tue, 7 Oct 2008 10:43:28 -0400 Kieren MacMillan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Graham, > > > waste time on this garbage > > I find is baffling ___ and, frankly, more than a little sad ___ that > you think discussing copyright issues is a "waste of time" for > > > professors, composers, programmers, musicians... > > But that's your issue, I guess. Copyright was introduced "to promote the progress of sciences and the arts". Do you think that including a 4-bar exerpt of a Ravel string quartet reduces Ravel's art? Or that he might composer less music if we included the exerpt? I don't think that anybody seriously thinks that we would be *morally* wrong to include four bars of anybody's music in order to demonstrate typographical features of lilypond. However, we would clearly be *legally* wrong to do so. In this case, I would argue that copyright law is *determental* to the arts. In fact, I think we'd be a lot better off if copyright law was scrapped entirely. It's impossible to control the spread of media -- to quote somebody, "making digital bits un-copyable is like making water not wet". We should just bite the bullet and scrap copyright. Artists and scientists can be paid in other ways -- an academic researcher could get promotions and tenure based on published papers (hey, that's what we have already!), and artists could be funded by comissions (some are already, and that was the historical model). Leaving aside those large-scale political discussions, focus on the lilypond documentation. Is it worth wading through copyright law in order to determine if we can use four bars of Ravel instead of four bars of Beethoven? Yes, 20th century music involves more complicated engraving, so it's better for showing off advanced lilypond features... but really, a nice Beethoven or Dvorak string quartet will achieve *almost* as most "inspiration", and with *far* less headache. The stated goal of finding an inspiration headword for strings are *not* being met by discussing French copyright law, so this 20+email thread is "garbage"[1]. Cheers, - Graham [1] I have to admit that I found the "don't count WWII years towards copyright for soldiers" law fascinating, and in another context I'd be happy to continue discussing it. Again, the "garbage" comment was in the context of lilypond doc improvements. _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
