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

[David Kastrup]

Urs Liska <address@hidden> writes:

> I think it boils down to:
> - can a GNU project link to (or promote in any other way) non-free
> documentation?

Not as much "can" but rather "should", and the answer to that is "no".

> - can I license a tutorial as free if it contains copyrighted material
> (considered I got explicit permission to display the example on my web
> site for the tutorial).

I don't understand what you mean with "license as free".  You can do
with the copyrighted material whatever you got permission for.  If you
relicense it under the GPL, any recipients are free to copy and modify
it for any purpose according to the license conditions of the GFDL.

You have not, as far as I can see, been given a permission to relicense
under such terms.  It may be worth asking for it, though.  The worst
that can happen to the copyright holders is that those four bars become
ubiquitous and people all over make a sport of writing "variations of
four bars of Schönberg".  As long as the four bars remain the same (and
people do not ask for four different bars every time until the whole
piece is available freely), I can't imagine this _reducing_ the amount
of full copies the copyright owners have a chance of selling.  I even
can't imagine this reducing the amount of licenses they hand out for
those bars explicitly: people seriously basing compositions on those
bars will likely not be happy to license them under GFDL, and so they
will ask for a proprietary license from the copyright holders anyway.

So there is some chance that, as long as we really are talking about
four bars here, you can get an "ok" from the copyright holders.

You definitely should not try making any use of that material, including
relicensing it, that you don't have permission for.

-- 
David Kastrup