Re: nice stockhausen excerpt

[Graham Percival]

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 01:41:33AM +0100, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> > see the german wikipedia
> > 
> >      http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/LilyPond
> > 
> > too bad it's under dispute.
> 
> Is it?  I don't see such a remark.  It is only stated that the picture
> shows copyrighted material which can only be cited legally as a very
> small snippet.

I can't read German, or speak about German copyright law.  And for
that matter, I'm not a trained lawyer in Canadian law (or anywhere
else).  This email does not constitute legal advice.

That said, I can't see how using that exerpt could possibly
qualify under Canada's "fair dealing" provisions in the copyright
act.  Distributing that de.wikipedia.org page in Canada would thus
constitute an infringement of copyright.
(or rather, if the server and client were both in Canada, it would
be an infringment.  I don't know -- and I'm pretty certain that
nobody *else* in the world does, either -- how precisely the legal
jurisdiction applies when doing this between different countries
over the internet)


Please note that I'm **not** claiming that I believe the current
Canadian law to be reasonable, moral, or fair.  I'm also not
claiming that anybody has a moral duty to follow any country's
laws, irrespective of whether or not they are a citizen of that
country.

In answer to any question about using such examples in the
LilyPond documentation (Jan and Werner haven't raised the issue,
but I'm certain that many readers will be wondering about this),
my position has not changed: The official LilyPond documentation
should not include any material which infringes on copyright in
any country.  In addition to distributing the webpages ourselves,
a number of people redistribute the lilypond docs; I don't think
we should try getting Debian in trouble by including any
copyright-infringing material.


I naturally cannot stop anybody else from tempting fate -- if
somebody created a webpage with material which they believed to be
morally ok (such as 4 bars of Stockhausen's Kavlierstuck II), more
power to them.

Cheers,
- Graham