On 11-Sep-99 Glen Prideaux wrote:
> The typesetting itself is copyright. My mudela code of a public
> domain tune is my edition. Even if I seek to reproduce exactly some
> out of copyright edition it will have aspects that reflect the
> decisions I make when coding it as mudela. I would expect that there
> would be no difficulty in establishing a copyleft policy on any such
> works. It's not the music you'd be copylefting, it's the typesetting
> as represented by the mudela code.
I realise that typesetting can be copyright - this is the reason I
can't buy a book of Bach's Urtexts (for example), photocopy parts of it
and give them away.
However, mudela code (by its very name - MUsic DEscription LAnguage)
just describes the music, in a similar way to which ASCII describes
plain text. I don't see how we can copyleft public domain /mudela/. We
could copyleft the dots and lines that make up music, but not the music
itself, eg. the fact that Beethoven's "Fur Elise" starts "e dis e dis b
d c a". This is what Beethoven wrote, and all we have done is type it
in. It is Lilypond that is creating the dots and lines from this mudela
description.
If, for example, some out-of-copyright music from Mutopia appears in a
book which people then charge for, and stop people copying, what is to
prevent them saying when challenged that they simply entered the music
into Lilypond themselves?
By the way, I'm also currently looking into using a varient on the
Project Gutenburg "Small Print" on the Mutopia website; I'll post more
details in a few days time.
Chris
--
Chris Sawer - Sussex, England - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
