Re: Lilypond lobbying?

[Joseph Wakeling]

On 08/19/2011 09:47 AM, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:
> No, they don't. They don't want a free world at all - did you read their
> rules?
> 
> The "winner" has to give all rights to this city hall, and the contest
> and its sponsors must appear an all publications of the piece forever!

Er, no.  They are asked to give up the usual authors' rights for
_performance of the winning work during the contest_ (until the 18th
December 2011).  It says nothing about rights for future performances.

It's not an unreasonable request -- it's just there to simplify the
performance-rights issues during the contest and doesn't affect future
income or the composer's control over the wider use of their work.

In practice it means (i) the festival has the legal right to perform of
the work during the festival and (ii) they don't have to worry about
author fees for those performances (not unreasonable as the winner is
already walking away with thousands of euros).

There's no long-term transfer of rights involved.

As for the request that you mention the fact that it was competition
winner in all future CD liner notes, programme notes etc., that's hardly
an onerous obligation is it?  It's only polite, not to mention mutually
beneficial.

> You're not allowed to put the piece under a free license or donate it to
> the public! You wouldn't even allowed to perform it yourself in a
> simplified form!

Wrong.  The Festival requests a very specific, limited set of rights
(the right to perform the work without author fees or per-performance
author permissions) that last for the duration of the festival only.

They do say that the publication of the works will be made in
partnership with the Town Hall and "a given publishing house", but also
that it will be "in agreement with the composers".  So it doesn't look
like there is any particular attempt to define the terms of the
agreement.  (They don't even define the publishing house, possibly
because some composers may already have an exclusive publishing deal and
therefore it would be undesirable to restrict publication to a single
organization.)

> Why does anyone using LilyPond care about these blokes at all?

Because even if they were requesting full copyright transfer, it's not a
good thing that they exclude composers on the basis of the software used.

> (Why does anyone care about a concerts for six organs at all? I'm just a
> humble folk musician, but I know there are great organs around where you
> don't need six organists playing at once. I can't imagine there's any
> musical advantage of six small organs over a good, big one...)

There are things you can do with twelve hands, that you can't with two
...  To be honest, musically speaking this looks like a fantastic
concept: the opportunity to write music for a very particular location
with very particular acoustic and sonic properties.