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Re: Solfege Resources -- 404 bach chorales in Lilypond format with Movab


From: Michael Ellis
Subject: Re: Solfege Resources -- 404 bach chorales in Lilypond format with Movable Do solfege.
Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2011 13:28:29 -0500

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 <address@hidden> 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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