Mike, Graham, Henning,
Thanks again, it's all good discussion. For the time being, I've altered
the home page on the solfege-resources site to offer two choices of License,
namely Free Art license in addition to CC BY-NC-AS. I've also added a
couple paragraphs explaining my understanding of U.S. copyright law and
urging users to accept the CC license with commercial restriction in honor
of Margaret GreenTree's patient labor while acknowledging that patient labor
in itself may not create copyrightable work and therefore offering also the
Free Art option. I realize that it may all be legally meaningless, but it
seems as I close as I can come for the moment to balancing the various legal
and ethical considerations.
I've still not heard from her. Hopefully she's just on vacation and will
eventually reply.
I'm still open to replacing the notation in the Bach Chorales with Phil's
work and offering those under Free Art license only. (Phil, if you will
send me a gmail address (needed by googlecode.com), I will authorize it for
commit privileges on the site). But please hold off from making extensive
changes as I'd like to revise the lilypond files to achieve even greater
separation between the notation and the output. I'd like to get to the
point where the notation files look like:
\include "common.ly"
\header { ... }
voiceFoo = { ... music ... }
voiceBar = { ... music ... }
...
\output
where \output is a scheme function defined in common.ly that (somehow)
detects the voicenames and creates all the \book { \score { ... } } blocks
needed to create the PDF and MIDI files for the full score and individual
parts.
If that is possible in LilyPond it would make it very simple for folks who
want to contribute transcriptions of other works to put their files in a
simple format and, at the same time, allow all the output to have a
consistent look. It also could allow for the use of command line defines to
control what gets generated.
I'm going to start a separate thread on that topic, so lets not discuss it
here.
Cheers,
Mike
On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 6:03 AM, Graham Percival <gra...@percival-music.ca>wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 03, 2011 at 02:16:44AM -0800, Mike Blackstock wrote:
> > Just to clarify: anything is copyrightable of course
>
> That is false.
>
> > - there's no laws
> > that I'm aware of that
> > prevent people from asserting a copyright; question is, can it/has it
> a
> > chance of standing up?
>
> You are confusing things. Somebody may claim to possess copyright
> on something, but "asserting a copyright" does not mean that it
> is, in fact, under copyright. Whether something is under
> copyright is a question of the written law and case histories (in
> countries which recognize precedence), not mere opinion.
>
> Granted, a pessimist may point out that certain highly-paid
> lawyers are more successful in having judges agree with their
> opinions than non-highly-paid lawyers. I am not claiming that the
> case history is a perfect record of objective judgements, but (for
> better or worse) those judgements *are* the precedence.
>
>
> Moreover, there are in fact laws against abusing the system.
> Various jursidictions have laws against "malicious prosecution".
> The (in)famous DMCA of the USA requires a copyright claimant to
> swear under perjury that they do, in fact, own the copyright in
> question.
>
> Admittedly, this does not appear to be enforced -- there have been
> a few cases wherein the MPAA, RIAA, or actors on their behalf,
> have claimed copyright when they did not in fact own the
> copyright. But that's a problem of enforcement, not the written
> law.
>
>
> > I spent an hour or so doing various searches looking for court
> decisions
> > and came up blank; I'm wondering if we're making a "mountain out of
> a
> > mole-hill"? Can somebody find an instance of a music publisher suing
> > somebody over such things?
>
> I believe that it is more common to issue a "cease and desist"
> letter first; if the offending party complies with it, there is
> generally no lawsuit. These definitely happen; for example,
> recent action against guitar tab notation for pop songs:
> http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2007/03/music_publisher/
>
> I've heard that publishers of "Christian pop/rock" songs are
> particularly active in this regard. There's good money in selling
> sheet music to church groups!
>
> And don't forget about the German kindergarden that was recently
> sued for infringing copyright on sheet music:
>
> http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,14741186,00.html?maca=en-rss-en-all-1573-rdf
>
>
> > Like I say I couldn't find any with my
> > average search skills; it would certainly be illuminating to see how
> the
> > courts have ruled however.
>
> Sadly, these stories are a dime a dozen these days. In many
> cases, they never go to court because any lawyer will tell their
> client that they don't have a hope of defending against the
> charge.
>
> For example, if your amateur church choir photocopies a 1984
> arrangement of a hymn for SATB plus rock band (for the teenagers
> in the congregation to play), that's a clear infringement of
> copyright. There's no point trying to defend yourself legally;
> you're absolutely on the wrong side of the law.
>
>
>
> > I'm wondering if fingerings and/or phrasing
> > slurs are even copyrightable:
>
> Yes.
>
> > is a suggestion on how to solve a
> > technical problem copyrightable?
>
> If it is in fixed form (generally meaning "written").
>
> > If so, couldn't one copyright a golf
> > swing?
>
> Not the swing itself, but any fixed representation of that swing.
> In this case, perhaps an instructional video? voice-over, showing
> the swing from different angles, maybe slow-motion video... that
> is definitely under copyright.
>
> > It starts to look ridiculous
>
> Some people, including myself, think so, and therefore vote in
> favor of political parties which favor copyright reform.
>
> But never confuse what is *moral* with what is *legal*. I have
> been discussing my interpretation of the *laws*. I am not saying
> that a company is *morally* justified in suing a kindergarten, or
> amateur choral group, or a website showing guitar tabs.
>
> Cheers,
> - Graham
>
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