| I will go out on a limb here and say that the GPL has nothing | whatsoever to do with copyrights that apply to music. In the US at | least, unless you perform music that is exclusively in the public | domain, you pretty much need to pay your dues to ASCAP/BMI or | explain the their lawyers why you don't need to.
There is a problem applying the GPL to music. The way it's phrased, it really does apply mostly to software. Of course, that was what it was designed for. | And anyway, I don't see that the GPL on source code is so | enforce-able in most cases. I always assume that any code I release | under the GPL is pretty much public domain. To | subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: | http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html The few tentative court cases over the GPL have pretty much validated the belief that it's a perfectly good copyright notice. Despite all the attempts by corporate PR to convince people that it's a form of public domain, the fact is that it isn't that at all. In fact, it's a combined copyright notice and license to use the code in certain ways that would not otherwise be permitted. One of its main purposes is to guarantee that companies can't steal your code, claim it's theirs, start selling it, and charge you with infringement for using your own code. This isn't at all a frivolous concern; it's what commercial interests do. And, of course, the same thing happens with music. There have been plenty of explanations of how artists find that, because of the fine prints in the recording contracts, they don't have the right to perform their own compositions without permission and paying royalties. Some lawyers have proposed an interesting theory as to why there have been few attempts to challenge the GPL. The simplest, of course, is that a compay's lawyers are likely to read it and say "Well, you have two choices. You can comply with it now. Or you can violate it, go to court, lose, and comply with it then." Lots of lawyers have stated publicly that the GPL does a good job of protecting against corporate theft. But there's a more interesting reason for the lack of legal challenges. This one explains that if you challenge a license of any sort, then for the duration of the court case, you can usually act as if the default laws for that sort of license were in effect. Most licenses restrict your rights, so a challenge is useful: Until the court case is decided, you can legally ignore its restrictions and follow the law's default "fair use" provisions. The GPL is an unusual license, however. It gives you more rights than the law does. So if you challenge it in court, you are bound by the more restrictive defaults until the case is decided. And if you win, you are permanently restricted to those defaults. Why would you challenge a license if the only possible outcome would give you fewer rights than those in the license? The lawyers who point this out also like to mention that this is an excellent reason for putting your code under the GPL. It effectively gives you a copyright that will never be challenged by any sane lawyer, unless they have really good grounds to believe that your copyright is totally invalid because you didn't write the code. Anyway, you can read lots about this at fsf.org and gnu.org. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
