Re: nice stockhausen excerpt

[Graham Percival]

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 10:01 AM, Hans Aberg <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On 22 Feb 2010, at 04:26, Graham Percival wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> Since it is a small snippet, not affecting the commercial value of the
> original work, it should be acceptable also under Canada's "fair dealing"
> interpretation by its Suporeme Court:
>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing#Canada

Please read that webpage.

"The fair dealing clauses[1] of the Canadian Copyright Act allow users
to engage in certain activities relating to research, private study,
criticism, review, or news reporting."

We are not doing research, private study, criticism, review, or news
reporting about Stockhausen.  The context is advertising or
documentation for an open-source project.  There is **no** provision
for Canadian fair dealing for such usage.

Even if our use somehow qualified as "research" -- which it
emphatically does *not* -- then we'd fail on the "alternatives to the
dealing".  Was there "a non-copyrighted equivalent of the work"
available?  Certainly.  It would take me 15 minutes to write some
music which showed the same typographical features of the
Stockenhausen, without infringing on that copyright.


I repeat: there is no way that our use of Stockhausen would qualify as
"fair dealing" under Canadian copyright law.  I cannot speak to
copyright law in Germany, Sweden, or other jurisdictions.


>> The official LilyPond documentation
>> should not include any material which infringes on copyright in
>> any country.
>
> Formally, you only have to comply with the local copyright law.

What is the "local copyright law"?  Is it Canada, where I wrote most
of the docs?  Is it the UK, where I currently reside?  Is it the
Netherlands, which is where Han-Wen and Jan are from?  Is it from
America, where the webserver might reside?  (I don't know where it is)

If that country in the trade war against the US declares that it will
no longer acknowledge US copyright (I forget the country, but they're
talking about this), then can I (legally) download any Hollywood
movies I want from servers in that country?  I don't think so.

>> 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.
>
> It is really up to them to learn about their local copyright law and make
> sure they comply.

We're not in the business of making it hard for linux distributions to
supply lilypond to their users.  That's precisely why we're keeping
legally questionable material out of our documentation.

Cheers,
- Graham