Re: ISMLP/WIMA (?)

[David Kastrup]

David Raleigh Arnold <address@hidden> writes:

> On Thu, 2012-01-19 at 11:05 -0800, Bernardo Barros wrote:
>> > Open software people tend to consider artists as being
>> > equivalent to programmers, so they think artists
>> > should starve. I have no sympathy with that view.
>> > Obviously. Knowledge should be free, Yale to the
>> > contrary. Art shouldn't be free until the artist gets his.
>> 
>> The source code of the lilypond score is not the `music' or even
>> `art', so maybe people get confused.
>
> That is true of the program code, but not the data.

Both are hardly distinguishable in LilyPond.  It is like saying that
interpunction is not copyrighted, but letters are.

> The document must carry a copyright notice if it contains the notes,
> because it is the composition written in a form of musical
> notation. The complete source, published with a copyright notice,
> would copyright the piece.  Published without the notice, all
> copyright would be lost.

That is utter nonsense.  Since about 1989, copyright by the author is
the default, with or without notice.  It is just harder to track without
notice.

> So if you upload the source of a score, see to it that
> it doesn't contain the notes. Regards, daveA

A download site will not usually accept to distribute content when it
has no knowledge of the license under which it can do so.  The license
obviously holds for _all_ copyrightable content.  In the case of musical
scores, it may be that the "programming parts" do not contain
significant creative content to fall under copyright protection,
depending on the skills and ingenuity of the author spent on those
aspects.  In that case, similar constructs may be done in other works
without much of a danger.

If you are not just exercising existing content of LilyPond, but
creating sufficiently non-trivial music functions and the like, they
will, of course, fall under copyright again.

-- 
David Kastrup