Re: Contemporary music documentation

[Graham Percival]

On Thu, Sep 03, 2009 at 02:15:50PM +0200, Joseph Wakeling wrote:
>    (iii) What are the restrictions on including examples from actual
>          contemporary scores?  I'm not thinking huge extracts, but maybe
>          a couple of bars from a known work just to illustrate how a
>          particular thing can be achieved.

Those "actual contemporary scores" must be placed in the public
domain, licensed under Creative Commons, or licensed under the GNU
FDL.  If you're thinking about an exerpt of Shostakovich or Glass,
then forget about it.  Blame copyright law[1], not me.

[1] in particular, "the most restrictive set of copyright laws of
any countries in which we want to make the documentation
available, i.e. the entire world".  I don't care if you interpret
US copyright law to allow for a few bars as "Fair use"; you'd also
need to satisfy Canadian "Fair dealing", whichever relevant phrase
is used in French law or German law, Japanese copyright law (I
honestly have no idea what kind of provisions they have), etc etc.

We've had "discussions" about copyright law before, and it's just
not worth doing it again.  Just accept that everything in the 20th
century not explicitly placed under a "free" license is dead, and
we'll all be happier.  Or at least, we'll all be less unhappy than
we would be if we had a long debate about various nations'
copyright laws.


Oh, and make sure you vote for your country's Pirate Party.
Branches started recently in the UK and Canada, so I've got my
next elections' votes lined up.  ;)

Cheers,
- Graham