On Wed, 26 May 1999, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:
> Comments? Ideas?
...
> Mutopia is an archive of public domain music, free for all to
> download, modify and redistribute. It should be based on free
> software. It is similar in spirit to the Gutenberg archive.
I think it would be much better to have a call for _copylefted_ music. Then
it would be based on the spirit of free software. There already exists a
growing body of free, copylefted music; why not build on that?
Releasing music in the public domain is a bad idea if the reason you are
doing it is to engineer a free society, because it will allow uncooperative
people to take the music and use it in propietary works. If you make the
music free, via GPL copyleft, then you ensure that the music will always be
free.
If Mutopia does end up using only music that is free in the GNU sense, I
volunteer to donate my entire archive of recorded, copylefted music, which
goes back to 1993 (much of it is not online yet, but we can arrange to work
this out later).
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonsoftware-copyleft.html
http://www.ram.org/ramblings/philosophy/fmp.html
http://dsl.org/linart/
http://dsl.org/magical_animal/
