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

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 01/11/2013 10:10 PM, David Kastrup wrote:
> Not as much "can" but rather "should", and the answer to that is "no".

"Should" needs to be tempered by a measure of common sense about whether doing 
so serves the goals of the GNU project.  Since the goal of a tutorial as 
described here would be to make it easier for people to adopt free software, it 
might well be considered an acceptable compromise.

After all, it'd be a 3rd-party tutorial, not the official documentation.

> 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.

Here's the situation as I see it.

   -- You have 4-5 bars of music, which is under copyright, and for which you
      have been given permission by the publisher to use for purposes of a
      tutorial.  There's no permission given to relicense or use in any
      other context than the tutorial.

   -- You have the text of the tutorial _which you have written_.  You hold
      the copyright for this text, so you're at liberty to license this as you
      see fit, so long as you add a clear exception for the in-copyright musical
      examples.

   -- It helps if you choose a free but non-copyleft license, e.g. Creative
      Commons Attribution (CC-BY) or the GNU All-Permissive license, because
      then there is no confusion over whether the licensing of the tutorial
      text must be extended also to the musical examples.

So, what you end up with is a text which is almost all freely licensed but which 
includes a few images or short musical examples whose use is restricted.

The worst-case scenario of this (since you have permission for the examples in 
your own tutorial) is that people who want to create derivative works have to 
remove the non-free examples or secure permission from the publishers 
themselves.  But if you make sure that there are plenty of musical examples that 
_are_ free, this should be a minimal hassle.

> 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.

Agree.  Even if you can't secure a free license for the few bars, you might well 
be able to secure a license to redistribute verbatim copies.

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

Also agree -- I'd hoped this much was clearer in what I'd already written. :-(