Re: Guide to Writing Orchestral Scores with Lilypond?????

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 01/10/2013 10:24 PM, Graham Percival wrote:
> Unless you are planning this as a protest, I doubt that
> deliberately setting out to infringe on copyright is a great
> strategy.  Are you really equipped to deal with a lawsuit from
> music publishers -- especially since there's now a public record
> of your awareness that you intend to break the law?

Excuse me?  Where did I say I planned breaking the law or infringing copyright?

What I actually said was,

    Personally I think that I small library of _real_ contemporary musical
    examples, compared to the published score, would be an extremely useful
    resource for Lilypond.  IT SHOULDN'T BE DIFFICULT TO SECURE PUBLISHERS'
    PERMISSION FOR SHORT EXTRACTS.

... which I know you read, because you responded to it.  It's not breaking the 
law or infringing copyright if you secure permission of the copyright holder.

> I have never looked at Trevor Baca's or Mike Solomon's scores and
> thought "gee, that looks somewhat nice, but I really can't praise
> it more because I don't have an existing score to compare it to."
> Their work is *absolutely beautiful* by itself.

Whoever said anything about praising it more or less?  This is a practical 
question -- Lilypond users and developers have gained a great deal out of 
comparing Lilypond's output very precisely to professionally-engraved examples 
of classical-period works (e.g. the introductory Essay, Janek's Mozart example 
in Lilypond Report 26), and there's value in making similar comparisons to 
contemporary music examples.

> I find it astounding that a group of composers keep on suggesting
> that it's impossible to either create nice examples or use
> material from their own scores.

My concern isn't about "nice examples" or showing off the beauty of Lilypond's 
output, it's about learning and teaching by comparison to published works, and 
there's a greater diversity of comparisons to be made by considering scores from 
composers outside the Lilypond community.

> It isn't precisely hard to find
> beautiful material in Mike's work, and most of them are already
> available in pdf form!  I can't remember off-hand if the ly source
> is available, nor whether it's under copyleft, but if not then he
> would almost certainly be willing to license a few bars under a
> permissive license.

Which is great, but is solving a different problem.

> If you truly want to spend a few hours writing letters to
> publishers, I would be interested to hear the results.

Happy to do so.  If Urs can get permission for his bars of Schoenberg from UE, I 
don't see that it will be a problem for other works.

> No.  "Fair use" would apply in *some* (not all) countries only if
> this was a treatise about that particular composer's style.  One
> of the "smell tests" is whether the educational goal could be
> achieved *without* using copywritten material -- which is
> certainly could be.

The greater problem is that some countries simply don't _have_ fair use rights 
... :-(  However, in this case the point is moot as Urs _did_ secure the 
copyright holder's permission.

I really don't see why you've let rip on me like this simply for reassuring Urs 
that his choice of a contemporary work by a well-known composer actually had 
some value.  No, it's not suitable for official Lilypond documentation because 
of licensing issues, but for a third-party resource there's no legal barrier so 
long as publisher permission is secured.