Mutopia: Where Music is Free 131
rabalde writes "Check the Mutopia project. In the same spirit of the beloved Project Gütenberg,
but consists of a growing collection of free music.
The essence of Mutopia is that of a growing number of musical scores all typeset using GNU Lilypond by volunteers. All the music is downloadable for free as Postscript (.ps) and PDF (.pdf) files , as well as Lilypond's own LY (.ly) file format."
Sheet music, meet socialism. (Score:1)
Think of who is in play here. It's not just the composers (the ASCAP and their vast legal army.) It's advertisers. And don't forget the paper corporations. Do you think that the CEOs of these large and powerful paper corporations are going to stand for this? Why should the head of Hammermill sit idly by after he finds out that people are able to download sheet music
Don't get me wrong, I am not terribly opposed to this idea. But you can bet your ass that a lot of powerful special interests will be. And we have seen what happens when powerful special interests collide with "the little guy." So go ahead
-- Dale
Re:Sheet music, meet socialism. (Score:1)
Re:Sheet music, meet socialism. (Score:2)
Bill - aka taniwha
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Re:Seventy Years? (Score:1)
Expiring copyrights at the time of copyright holder's death creates incentive to kill the copyright owner. The 70 year delay eliminates this incentive.
Re:as robust as Gutenberg? (Score:2)
Gutenberg is a committed effort run by enthusiastic volunteers, with one *very* enthusiastic volunteer at the center. Exactly like all the successful projects on the internet. No monks needed.
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Re:Sheet music, meet socialism. (Score:2)
Sure. So what? The principle of capitalism is not: "Thou shalt pay money to and thereby protect the profits of companies". Quite the opposite: "Thou shalt maximize your own profits". If this latter principle, as a result, kills off some useless company, so much the better. Corporations try to screw consumers, consumers try to screw coroporations: that's the name of the game after all.
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GMD free sheet music archive (Score:2)
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Re:Seventy Years? (Score:1)
You're full of bullshit. The purpose of copyright law is to encourage creators to publish their work, knowing that they can expect to make a living from it. Granted, the seventy year thing is a little out of line but come on, that's not the purpose of copyright.
We are supposed to have moved beyond this sort of situation in which the undeserving yet well-born are given a leg up on everyone else. This is not fair and it is not equality.
Life isn't fair and it isn't equal either. Besides, who are you to stop someone from passing on their wealth and possessions to their children? It's a basic right.
If government refuses to pass laws to promote equality amongst all peoples, then it becomes the duty of the right-thinking to violate government whim in direct opposition to their bourgeois policies.
Oh, brother...
I will continue my long crusade against all forms of copyright by utilizing Napster, Gnutella, Freenet, and any other source of revenue-harming protest I can.
Fine. But you're not doing this because of the seventy year stipulation of copyright law. You're doing it because you don't believe in intellectual property. And that is entirely different.
Re:Sheet music, meet socialism. (Score:1)
Re:Copyright question. (Score:1)
IANAL either, but I believe that an Urtext edition will suffice. But you can't reproduce the preface or footnotes.
No Monks needed (Score:1)
This _is_ an decentralized set of contributors.
You have have texts you'd like to contribute? Take part!
-j
Re:this ROCKS (Score:1)
On the downside, why is everything an FTP link? I'd really like to click on a MIDI or PNG link and have it just play/show--as it is I have to download the MIDI or score and view it "manually".
Did you set up your browser to view
Finally got it all installed and lilypond just crashes.
Again, please submit a bugreport. Your description is too vague to be useful.
Re:I'll believe in it when I see... (Score:1)
We don't have any operas, but you can find a 50 page orchestral score done in LilyPond at GMD [www.gmd.de]. I'm not sure why Mats didn't put it up at mutopia, though. We also have the full ouverture Coriolan (by Van Beethoven), included in the lilypond package--unfortunately, there is no rendered version on the web right now.
Why would anyone waste time entering stuff into Lilypond's clumsy 1960's-era notation when they could use something like Finale, which at least approaches the efficiency of Mozart and Rossini's scratchings with a quill pen?
I am not really qualified to judge (never used Finale), but from what I've heard it is quite tedious to use, and finetuning formatting is at least as big a nightmare as tweaking a .ly file. Moreover, one could enter music in finale, and then convert it to .ly.
The way I see it, the two big barriers are:
LilyPond author reply (why .ly format?) (Score:4)
When I started LilyPond, I felt that there had to be a good justification for the existence of LilyPond, so I wrote a little document about a PD sheet-music archive to be called "Mutopia". Some years later, we had gathered too many test-scores in the lilypond package, and decided to host them in a separate archive. I called for volunteers to set this up. Chris Sawer (to whom I owe a big thanks!) made the site that's featured in this article.
Of course, I wanted the files to be usable with free-software, so using Sibelius or Finale was out of the question. There are some other options, like the ABC format [gre.ac.uk], but they have more technical limitations.
Anyway, LilyPond format is flexible (I wrote several convertors to it, among others a Finale to .ly convertor) and Lily also dumps the output as a nicely quantized MIDI file, which is rather easy to import into other programs.
When it comes to music representation there aren't any good published standards: the problem with NIFF is not that it is binary per se, but rather that it is quite limited, and has a tendency to glue together musical and graphical information into a big blob. Also, there aren't any free score editors that support NIFF.
As for SMDL, I don't think that there exists any software that can meaningfully handle SMDL.
Re:Seventy Years? (Score:2)
C'mon. That's just silly. If somebody produces a work at say, 25, and die at 75, they'll have had 50 years earning royalties to leave to their children. If this music is still purchased with sufficient regularity after 50 years to make collecting royalties worthwhile, surely it will already have made more than enough money to justify writing the song. Very, very few composers will ever write music that will be played long after their death. Look at, say, the big band music of the 1940's. How much of that is still played regularly today? A couple of dozen tunes, maybe?
Additionally, you're assuming that greater rewards are going to lead to better music. While greater rewards might leave a composer more time to spend on each piece, beyond that I doubt that it makes any difference. Great composers aren't generally motivated by money, any more than great software designers.
Re:Seventy Years? (Score:2)
If the artist is dead, what difference does it make to them?
True to some extent, but perhaps not as much as it was. However, why does that entitle their descendants to windfall profits?
It's not *one* company that would earn the profits. If copyright lapsed, it would be anybody with a printing press who wanted to run them off. In any case, I don't think my hypothetical grown grandchildren really deserve any money from the book. They didn't write it - I did. And, obviously, if I didn't attempt to publish the book, money wasn't the motivating factor for writing it.
In any case, this is a very rare situation. The situation where this becomes important is immensely popular copyrighted works such as the old Disney movies, and music such as Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue. All of these have already earned massive amounts of money for the copyright holders, and have become part of our history and culture. How long are large corporations going to earn a rake-off on these works?
Re:Movies (Score:1)
I know people who do, and what they make is completely out of proportion to the amount of time, effort and dedication required to become any good at it.
And stop whining.
Don't want to pay for the Happy Birthday song? Write your own birthday song, or find a musician to write one for you, and sell you the rights.
Re:Movies (Score:1)
Anyway, it's up to the copyright holder to draw the line. Nobody charges you money for singing Happy Birthday at home, but if N'Sync covered it, and sold 10,000,000 copies of it (I shudder at the thought...), don't you think the authors should have the option of being compensated? What if N'Sync covered one of
Now, how exactly do you draw the conclusion that widespread use of a work somehow makes it ok to deprive the author from the rights to her work? This amounts to saying "Yes, you can make money on music, but only as much as we allow". Fair use in copyright law already allows most uses you're thinking of, and common sense on most copyright holders' part makes the rest of them fine, too. Nobody sends lawyers to kids' birthday parties to stop those rascals from singing Happy Birthday. At least I'm not aware of anyone doing so.
'ridiculous'? (Score:1)
Re:Seventy Years? (Score:1)
(I agree with you about the 70 year thing, and the purpose of copyright is to allow the creator to not have his/her work stolen from him/her by someone else like a big corporation. Things change, eh?)
Re:Movies (Score:2)
The restaurants would get sued otherwise. Evil, evil, evil.
On a related topic - you know Disney will pay whatever it takes - millions of dollars if neccessary - to bribe Congress to extend copyright again. They will never allow Mickey Mouse to enter the public domain.
The only hope is campaign finance reform.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Re:Seventy Years? (Score:2)
Yes, probably.
Hell, what is the purpose of musical copyright in the first place?
To provide motivation for artists to publish their works by giving them a limited monopoly on them.
Music, like digital information, is nothing more than a specific arrangement of a finite number of symbols. The entire concept that someone can "own" a particular grouping of symbols is at best ludicrous.
They don't "own" the music. They own the copyright to a piece of music. Sigh......
It's... (Score:1)
Re:Of all the formats... Lilypond?! (Score:1)
Seems like a lot of the info is out of date (e.g. predictions that SMDL will likely be adopted by ISO in late 1996). The only link to a draft is in postscript format from a (for me) unresponsive ftp site.
SMDL also sounds like it wants an import tool or at least some kind of pretty interface for score writing--I can just imagine how horrendous transcribing a score manually would be in SMDL! SMDL isn't just for scores, right? It's supposed to be able to describe
Anyway, I found this link: XML and Music which had some other ventures in the music markup arena.
In principle, a text/ASCII markup sounds preferable to a binary format, IMHO.
Re:Of all the formats... Lilypond?! (Score:1)
nevermind that incomplete sentence in the post previous and here's that link again:
Here's the link again:
http://xml.coverpages.org/xmlMusic.html [coverpages.org]
Try reading the link (Score:1)
Spelling (Score:1)
-jfedor
Copyright question. (Score:2)
Am I being too paranoid? If so, why is that most sheet music I've bought has a very prominent 'do not photocopy' sign on its first page? It's not that they can copyright the music itself, but it seems they sure can copyright that particular transcription.
So, if a score contains an extraneous # somewhere, or some extra ligature or something that can be attributed to a specific edition, and you blindly copy it and post it to the site, what do you think your legal position would be?
I know this is a can of worms, and I can understand the book publishers that want to protect their investment (especially if the score in question is an arrangement or a reduction of an orchestral score to a piano score) but at the same time I would love that somebody created a repository with freely available sheet music, so musicologists and enthusiasts would be able to study a composer's work without having to resort to online ordering to find the score they're looking for.
P.S. the last time I bought sheet music I was still living in Europe, so maybe here in North America the 'do not photocopy' signs do not exist
MODERATORS (Score:1)
Re:Sheet music, meet socialism. (Score:1)
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"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Re:Seventy Years? (Score:1)
I don't know if you're playing devil's advocate here or not. Anyway:
Yes, but copyright is a question of balance between authors' interests and consumers' interests. (And author's interests are extended only to help guarantee that the work gets produced in the first place - ultimately, it all comes down to the public interest.) Specifically, it is most in consumers' interest to have a work in the public domain as soon as possible.
Life of the author plus seventy years seems to shift this balance far too far towards the authors. Also, one can't help but be suspicious when the lobbies for copyright extension include so many large and organized media companies, and the opposition is somewhat ragtag and not nearly as well-financed.
Besides that, it's worth mentioning that the question of what motivates authors and artists to produce work is very far from having a clear answer. My own opinion is that it has a lot more to do with love of their field and desire for fame than it does with leaving their children a healthy inheritance -- they could probably expect better results on that front if they went into, say, accounting.
Re:OLGA is running fine now... (Score:2)
Puhleeze....
What kind of society will this kind of thinking lead to? I am an amateur musician, and I have made many a transcription (or should I say 'interpretation') of songs I like. I have friends who play as well, and I have no qualms whatsoever in giving them these transcriptions. Am I 'stealing' something now? NO.
Music is still a form of art, no matter what the 'music industry' wants us to believe. It is not a 'product'. Pre-packaged recordings may be 'products', but the music itself (the 'composition') it not. Ask any musician, and (s)he'll probably agree. Unless, of course, they're in it *just* for the money. But in that case their music probably won't be interesting enough to transcribe anyway. There's nothing wrong with *making money* on music, but when it becomes the sole purpose there probably won't be any music worth listening to anyway (right, Dr. Dre?).
Where do you think music comes from? What do you think it means when some musician tells you she has her 'roots' in this and that artist or such and so style? Do you think she means she signed a contract with those artists, a licensing agreement whereby she gained the right to use parts of their 'intellectual property' in her own works? Is that how you want the music of the 21st century to be?
Not me. If I hear a song I like, I'll try to play it. If I like the way it came out, I might write it down. If someone else likes it, they can have it. Sue me...
MST3K's "Public Domain Karaoke Machine" (Score:1)
Re:Of all the formats... Lilypond?! (Score:2)
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Re:Copyright question. (Score:3)
Certain versions of scores are known as "Urtext," meaning that they are exactly what the composer wrote, to the best of anyone's knowledge. Those are the scores the contributors use for input.
If so, why is that most sheet music I've bought has a very prominent 'do not photocopy' sign on its first page?
Because most of them are either recent or edited. No one said Urtext editions are neccesarily easy to come by.
(Note: you could have read about this if you had visited the page, and followed the link to "Legal Information")
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Thoughts and elaborations from a contributor (Score:4)
With regard to its legality, you really ought to read their page dedicated to legal issues: here is the Google-cached version [google.com]. In a nutshell, there are three sets of copyrights to take into account: The Composer's, the Editor's, and the Typesetter's. The typesetter's doesn't matter, because in this case, the computer (or more specifically, Lilypond [lilypond.org]) does that. We try to avoid the editor's copyright as well, by (surprise!) inputting from music that isn't edited! These are referred to as "Urtext" versions.
So taking both those things into account, it's perfectly legal to input music from an unedited score if the composer has been dead for at least 70 years.
Now on the technical side, music typesetting is not an exact science, and Lilypond, though mature and under very active development (current release is 1.3.124, I believe), still has its weaknesses. Though much of the output it produces is very readable and usable, sometimes it's less than ideal. You can tweak almost anything, but it often requires knowledge of its complicated implementation (C++ and Guile, I believe). Not only that, but it's SLOW! Typesetting a piece of 8 or 9 pages on my PII-300 96MB RAM takes about a minute, which sucks when you're going back to make small corrections. The run-time increases exponentially (it seems, that's not an exact observation) with more voices and more pages.
Input is done in plain text, in a terse-as-you-can-handle grammar, which is fairly simple to understand, though a bit more complicated once you actually try to assemble all the voices into a completed score. The example that's on the lily home page (I'm guessing it'll be slashdotted before long) is:
\relative c'' { \key c \minor; r8 c16 b c8 g as c16 b c8 d | g,4 }
Which is pretty self-explanitory. Every note is assumed to be the closest note of that name, unless you override (see the last g, the comma means down an octave), every note is assumed to have a duration of the note that came before unless you override, the pipe is a bar check, and it'll warn you if the bar doesn't end up where you told it to be. Really not too difficult, especially if you download an already completed score to base your work on.
The project is fairly small at the moment (42 scores, many of them different movements of the same work), especially compared to Gutenberg, but it can only grow. The biggest problem I've run into is finding unedited copies from which to input.
I'd encourage anyone to contribute! I look forward to the day where there are great archives where you can download expired music for quick reference, or for scholarly curiosity. It'll never replace printed, published music, of course, there's nothing like having a real, bound copy, but it could be great for certain things.
The web page is also available at http://sca.uwaterloo.ca/Mutopia/ (in case www.mutopiaproject.com goes down), though it may be the same machine, I'm not sure.
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Re:Books, Music .. (Score:2)
BTW. I remember a story about a Japanese businessman who owned at least 2 Van Gough's painting. He was planning to be cremated with them. Ah the joys of un-restrained capitalism.
Re:Seventy Years? (Score:2)
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Re:Seventy Years? (Score:2)
It's not an assumption I made, but rather an assumption the founding fathers made:
But I'll take a crack at defending it anyway.
While great composers may produce a few truly great and eternal works, on the whole, it's probably the only reasonably skilled workers who produce the greater amount of works. And probably, when you sum it up, the mid-level people probably produce the greatest benefit to society, by using and abusing and fully exploring the inovations of the great ones.
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Re:Seventy Years? (Score:4)
both the Berne Convention and the EU directive have accepted the standard that copyright should protect the author and two succeeding generations. Based on the numerous viewpoints presented to the Committee as it has considered these issues, the Committee concludes that the majority of American creators anticipate that their copyrights will serve as important sources of income for their children and through them into the succeeding generation. The Committee believes that this general anticipation of familial benefit is consistent with both the role of copyrights in promoting creativity and the constitutionally based constraint that such rights be conferred for "limited times."
Among the primary justifications asserted for the adoption of the life-plus-70 term under the EU Directive was the conclusion that the life-plus-50 term is no longer sufficient to protect two generations of an author's heirs.
The Register of Copyrights informed the Committee that even for post-1978 works, which are afforded the basic life-plus-50 term of protection, the current term has proven insufficient in many cases to protect a single generation of heirs. For example, Walter Donaldson, who will forever be linked via his songs to the extraordinary success of the 1927 film "The Jazz Singer," composed many of his most famous works when he was in his twenties and died in 1947 while in his fifties. Were the current life-plus-50 term applied at that time, all of his works would fall into the public domain at the end of 1997. Nevertheless, Ellen Donaldson, the composer's daughter, remains extremely active in publishing and exploiting her father's music and in protecting his copyrights. Like the children of composers such as Richard Rogers, Irving Berlin, Richard Whiting, Hoagy Carmichael, and many others, her legitimate interest in her father's copyrights can be expected to continue for decades, and most certainly for the next 20 years.
In order to reflect more accurately Congress' intent and the expectation of America's creators that the copyright term will provide protection for the lifetime of the author and at least one generation of heirs, the bill extends copyright protection for an additional 20 years for both existing and future works.
The Committee is aware of the criticism of the proposed extension by those who suggest that it marks a step down the road of perpetual copyright protection. The Committee is unswayed by this argument for three reasons. First, the greatest obstacle to a perpetual term of copyright protection is the U.S. Constitution, which clearly precludes Congress from granting unlimited protection for copyrighted works. Second, the emerging international standard, to which the bill purports to adhere, and the movement of international copyright law in general are not toward perpetual protection, but to a fixed term of protection based on the death of the author. Third, the principle behind the U.S. copyright term--that it protect the author and at least one generation of heirs--remains unchanged by the bill. The 20-year extension proposed by the bill merely modifies the length of protection in nominal terms to reflect the scientific and demographic changes that have rendered the life-plus-50 term insufficient to meet this aim.
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Re:Where is this music free ? (Score:1)
It'd be the ot calling the kettle black if I didn't mention that I have some Philip Glass and John Adams in my 1590-disk CD collection but I doubt that's what you meant by relevance.
Re:Of all the formats... Lilypond?! (Score:2)
Actually, that's not a bad idea. Take Lilypond as one of the accepted submission languages, but maintain everything in the repository in one of the more standard formats.
I'm not sure how perfectly convertable they are, though. Converting from NIFF to Lilypond would be lossy at best. Converting the other way is probably like converting from Fortran to C. (Have you ever looked at the output from f2c?)
Re:Of all the formats... Lilypond?! (Score:2)
While Coda did withdraw support (though there is an Open Source project which is an ETF to NIFF converter), it is supported by Mark of the Unicorn, Musitek, Musicware (which probably covers most of the non-Finale market), plus some of the most prolific publishers such as Boosey & Hawkes and Hal Leonard.
Of all the formats... Lilypond?! (Score:3)
Naturally, they had to pick the least compatible music notation format there is.
The most compatible is NIFF [musitek.com]. It's non-proprietary, and supported by all major music notation software. The only problem is it's a binary format, but then so is PDF. A good cross-platform ASCII format would be SDML [techno.com], which based on SGML and currently in ISO draft standard status.
After years of pleading with others to stick to published standards, is it too much to hope that we do the same?
Geek-Musician alliance needed? (Score:5)
It gets worse. We geeks often think we're breaking new ground with our hatred of insane copyright law and regulations, but it's been going on for years.
In Australia, performing Grand Right Works (basically anything intended to be performed on stage, such as opera, musical, revue, pantomime or choral work over 20 minutes long) requires paying money to AMCOS [amcos.com.au], no matter how long the composer has been dead. You heard it right. Performing a Bach Chorale requires paying the copright meisters even though Bach has been dead for 250 years. How can they do this? Simple: if you don't pay them money for these works that are out of copyright, you don't get the rights to copy or perform anything that is under copyright. They have you by the proverbials.
My mother is a music teacher. Music teachers need to bang their collective heads against these ridiculous regulations all the time, because one thing that music teachers do a lot of is get students to perform music, which requires obtaining performing rights, photocopying rights and so forth. She lived in almost perpetual fear of the AMCOS inspectors. At one point (she doesn't do this any more BTW), she kept her cache of photocopied music in the boot (note for Americans: trunk) of her car and only brought into the office that which was needed for that day.
Oh, and just being out of copyright doesn't necessarily help you. I don't know if you've ever read a composer's autograph, but they're often almost illegible. (I know, I edited a Bach's "Musical Offering" once. I should type it up and submit it to Mutopia.) You really need an edited and published version. But editing and publishing slaps a new copyright on that edition.
IMO, if we geeks spoke to musicians and music teachers over the insanity of copyright law, we would find a strong and vocal ally.
I'll believe in it when I see... (Score:1)
The amount of effort involved in entering a single note of music, using any technology (including a pen), is 2-100 times the effort involved in entering a single character of text. (This is a gut estimate, based on having done a moderate amount of music transcription.) The lower number applies to simple situations such as writing a quarter note, the higher to complex ones that include things like beaming, expression marks, etc. Lilypond is, um, not the most efficient entry method.
I was impressed that a Mozart horn concerto is one of the works that was entered...until I downloaded it and found that it was only the solo part; the orchestral score is missing.
Frankly, this whole thing seems like a bit of silliness to me. Enthusiasm is great, but so is intelligent application of resources. Why would anyone waste time entering stuff into Lilypond's clumsy 1960's-era notation when they could use something like Finale, which at least approaches the efficiency of Mozart and Rossini's scratchings with a quill pen?
Is sheet music for "Master of Puppets" available? (Score:1)
And then you're gonna be in BIG trouble.
Licensing??? (Score:1)
Can new, original pieces be added to this? What license will they need? Is the street performer's protocol up to scratch?
I'd think it should be easy to do a system (buzzword alert!) , like with p2p, where through UDP you start a connection that streams a track over the internet that others can join in on, or sample or record, resulting in a tree, which at the end of it's branches is low quality, and phased out from the original broadcast by network lag + processing time, and which has as a parent a soloist musician, or a recording with the best quality. Wouldn't be a good way to get good quality jamming material, but would be a feasible way of doing community stuff with music.
So instead of going to the basement and jamming alone after a hard day, you could do it over the internet, with the chance that other people could share what you were doing.
Then you could put resulting public domain (equivalent to GPLed tracks) music on this archive, and anyone could download it. Face it, not everyone now needs sheet music: some need samples too.
Anyway, Great, wonderful, but no license. WHat license do you use for something like this???
Original, you need an original. (Score:2)
Same goes for TV music. Say I want to sample a 1920's ragtime for a bit of house. I go out to the store, buy a copy of 'Greastest Ragtime Hits of 1921' on CD. But alas! The copyright date is 1999! Why? Somewhere along the line, an owner of the original recording did a little tweaking to it, say he transferred it from Edison Pressed Celluloid to magnetic tape, and copyright started all over. He sold the rights to his recording to someone else, who ran it through a series of filters to make it sound more lifelike, and copyright started all over again. They do the same thing with TV; Check out the copyright line on, say Rocky and Bullwinkle. It runs late at night on Cartoon Network. That's right, boys and girls, it says "Copyright 1987 Jay Ward Productions"
Not copyright, contractual right. (Score:2)
On the other hand, if I have copyright on an older photograph of the painting, I can digitize it at will. I hold copyright on that particular image, and not even Billy Boy can bitch at me.
Re:Original, you need an original. (Score:2)
What good is the expiration of 'It's a Wonderful Life' if the expiration only applies to one film copy locked in the studio vault, and none of the successive copies?
Re:Midi IS a standard output from Lilypond (Score:1)
Copyright on Jazz tunes (Score:1)
Why this is important... (Score:1)
Re:OLGA is running fine now... (Score:1)
OLGA is running fine now... (Score:2)
Re:Where is this music free ? (Score:1)
I mean how many of you actually listen to 70 year old "Top Ten" hits, if they existed !?!?
I sure hope that's a troll. There was once a time when people listened to music because it's beautiful, not because they can brag to their friends that they have the l33test 0-day mp3s.
So who will be the first... (Score:1)
Re:Seventy Years? (Score:1)
Tell me about it, all of us should be so lucky that our employers would pay our great-grandchildren for work that we are doing today.
What are you talking about? (Score:1)
IIRC printed scores are pretty expensive?
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"I'm surfin the dead zone
Artchive... (Score:1)
http://www.artchive.com/ftp_site.htm [artchive.com]
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"I'm surfin the dead zone
Re:Seventy Years? (Score:1)
If I made a fortune as an artist or businessman, I wouldn't want my money to be made available for politicians to waste. Better then if they go to my children or grandchildren.
You aren't just jealous of people with inheritances, are you?
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"I'm surfin the dead zone
A valuable research tool? (Score:3)
But this project is important for more than just personal access to music -- it might also be very useful in academic research. I'm a medieval history major, and my professors have been raving about the availability of digitized versions of medieval texts -- you can search for a word or build a concordance in no time flat, and that's brought a number of new discoveries to light that before would just have been lost amid the thousands of parchment manuscripts.
What I wonder is whether this same effect might be seen by university music departments if something like Mutopia becomes very successful. If the entire works of J.S. Bach are available in a single library in a standard format, you could probably teach a computer to search for chord patterns, etc., and develop new ways of analyzing the score that require far less effort than just reading it through (especially for someone as prolific as Bach). If your library is big enough, you could even compare the styles of various composers and identify connections and links that before would have been entirely missed.
Of course, that would require some serious work, which means serious funding. The Mutopia "how to contribute" [mutopiaproject.org] page talks only about music, not about cash; would there be a way to turn the project into a larger effort? This is something that universities, private charitable foundations, corporations looking for feel-good gifts, or anyone who supports the local symphony might be happy to sponsor. (And who knows? Maybe NEA [nea.gov] would be happy to join in -- it would certainly be less controversial than Mapplethorpe photos.)
While Project Gutenberg may be too general to recieve this kind of support, a specific and research-focused project might go further than we expect.
Re:Seventy Years? (Score:1)
First, the greatest obstacle to a perpetual term of copyright protection is the U.S. Constitution, which clearly precludes Congress from granting unlimited protection for copyrighted works.
Pardon my Australian, but *bullshit*. This is totally enenforceable so long as Congress can make the claim 'X plus another 20 years is still less than unlimited', where X is the current period and X plus 20 is being sought - which is exactly what they have done. *Repeatedly*.
Second, the emerging international standard, to which the bill purports to adhere, and the movement of international copyright law in general are not toward perpetual protection, but to a fixed term of protection based on the death of the author.
Ah, so the very Committee - which has just agreed to change the term of protection - claims that it is actually fixed. Damn, imagine if banks could do that with fixed interest loans. "Oh, did we say five percent? I'm sorry, we meant fifteen percent. Just change that little bit of the contract we signed with you."
Third, the principle behind the U.S. copyright term--that it protect the author and at least one generation of heirs--remains unchanged by the bill. The 20-year extension proposed by the bill merely modifies the length of protection in nominal terms to reflect the scientific and demographic changes that have rendered the life-plus-50 term insufficient to meet this aim.
Ah. I see. So as scientific progress continues to improve our lifespans, copyright should be extended similarly? Yeah, I can't wait to see all the millenia-old geezers hoarding their royalty cheques. NOT!
These legal tricks are total and utter bullshit, and it's a pity that the founders of the U.S. didn't state a specific number of years when they wrote the Constitution. At least then it'd require an Amendment to pass this crud. If the committee was truly concerned about an author's kids, they'd fix the term at twice the age of legal adulthood or something (36 years, in Australia): time enough for raising a family and seeing your kids become independant adults, even if you haven't started that family yet.
Finally, if anyone thinks I'm biased - heck yes. My mum's a successful author, but I don't want to bludge off her success for the rest of my life. I want to grow up to make my own contribution to the world!
copyright is NOT a problem because ... (Score:1)
Re:as robust as Gutenberg? (Score:1)
Is air still free? (Score:1)
At the risk of playing to the troll.... Since this music is all in the public domain, your assertions are akin to telling people that they can't grow their own gardens because they are taking money out of the mouths of farmers. The capital you're so concerned about is just shifted to another segment of the economy.
If the music were still under copyright you might make the argument that the copyist is denying the originator the fruits of his/her labor, but this is just inane.
Need to inform High Schools (Score:1)
First, there have to be a lot more submissions and it has to be very clear where they came from and that they are legal. CHECK, CHECK, CHECK to make sure that is true. Then, check again. Remember if this actually starts to hurt a company's business the lawyers will swarm like sharks.
Second, once the project has matured, the word needs to be put out to schools. They will gain the most immediate benefit, and be the most worthwhile talent pool to develop. Students may eventually contribute original work to the project, so lets get the name out! Of course, the hard part is reaching people without having the project dismissed as a scam. Hmmm. I suppose some teachers union can be notified, and have them spread the word. Anyway, that's important, but for the future. Right now, lets find those unedited sheets and typeset some music!
Denemo is the current GUI (Score:1)
Try Denemo (Score:2)
Re:Copyright question. (Score:2)
They do. And most musicians (as in, people in community bands, choruses, and the like) ignore them when it's an inconvience (mainly, when the group is trying out a song to see if it's something they want to do). For most public performances, you've got to get all the permission and pay royalties and all that - even if the performance is free. (At least, as far as I know. I've never been directly involved with obtaining performing rights - I do know they have to be obtained even for free concerts.)
I wonder how much revenue is lost to those evil pirates who photocopy their music and don't pay royalties on the donations received on their weekly Sunday performances? Most church choirs I know would be in a lot of trouble if anyone ever checked up on how well they abided to copyright law.
Re:Seventy Years? (Score:1)
So, did Mr. Bono's ghost have anything to do with this one, too?
"Clearly precludes" my ass. There's no difference between "unlimited protection" and "protection that will expire five years from now, or rather now, I really mean now..."
Oh well.
Re:Where is this music free ? (Score:2)
Re:Seventy Years? (Score:1)
It is time to split creators from Distributors (Score:1)
Just like banks and insurance companies were separated at the beginning of the century because they could not be trusted together, just like AT&T was split because it could not be trusted to handle both Long Distance and Local traffic, it is time to split the Content Creation from Content Distribution. A company can Create new Content, or a company can Distribute such a content, but it cannot do both nor can both types of companies be part of the same consortium. In plain English: Disney can create new movies, but Disney cannot distribute it. Same thing with the record labels. No distribution company could hold any copyright to anything but their own name.
By freeing distribution companies from the burden of copyright problems, they will concentrate on ways and means to make the content more accesible to the masses. They would earn their profit from making content available. Instead of one napster, we would see a million napster and the impulse to fiber-optic every house in order to deliver the best quality content to the house.
On the other hand, content creators will dedicate their time to make new creations to entertain a ever more sophisticated public, to make new things. There will be a stop to those hurry up jobs, quick compilations, those CDs with one hit and 11 fillers. If the work is not good, distribution cannot sell it and there would be no demand.
Right now the marriage of content creating/distributing conglomerates is what forces such low-quality, high-priced content into the public, where the sheer force of distribution on one side and copyright misuse on the other side deprives the general mass public from qualifying what is worthy and what is not. My two cents.
Yeah right.... and this got modded up because??? (Score:1)
a) I'm against IP law and won't respect it
b) I'm an anarchist
c) I just don't want to pay
d) All of the above
..and a few others, but give me a break.
Kjella
more PD and open-source music links (Score:1)
Does anyone know how the effort to make a GUI for LilyPond is going? Until that effort is complete, this kind of activity is unfortunately going to be limited to (a) extreme geeks who want to hand-code LilyPond, or (b) people who don't mind shelling out lots of money for proprietary software.
The Assayer [theassayer.org] - free-information book reviews
Re:Where is this music free ? (Score:1)
It would be relevant if you'd stop whining, compose some of your own music, and intentionally make it free.
The Assayer [theassayer.org] - free-information book reviews
Re:OLGA is running fine now... (Score:1)
Why don't you make some free information yourself instead of acting like everybody in the world deserves to be your slave and produce what you want for free?
The Assayer [theassayer.org] - free-information book reviews
Re:OLGA is running fine now... (Score:2)
If people really believe it's immoral to own information, they should come out and say it, and admit they don't think songwriters deserve their money. They shouldn't try to make bogus claims that what they're doing is legal.
In any case, let's not confuse what OLGA is doing with what Mutopia is doing. Mutopia hosts public-domain stuff, and could also host music that was intentionally made free by living composers. It's not a music warez site like OLGA.
The Assayer [theassayer.org] - free-information book reviews
Re:Books, Music .. (Score:2)
The Web democratized publishing, and gazillions of people have now published the equivalent of short articles via the internet -- they're called web pages. As for full-length books, there are (see my sig) something like 150 free-as-in-beer or free-as-in speech books that I know of (not counting old public-domain books). Commercial publishers have even started making books free-as-in-beer (example [slashdot.org]).
What about music? Mutopia is doing a great job with public-domain music (does anyone understand how tedious it is to enter a long piece of complex classical music into LilyPond notation by hand, with no GUI???), but it's amazing what a wasteland the net is for music intentionally made free by living artists. I made an ill-fated attempt to create a site for free-as-in-speech music (focusing more on recent stuff). Now I made a lot of blunders, so really I just have to count this as an learning experience in how not to build an online community. But it's still just a little shocking that there's virtually no free-as-in-speech modern music on the web. (I contributed a few of my own jazz tunes [lightandmatter.com], but I don't claim they're anything earthshattering.)
This is particularly pathetic because there's so much music notation software that's either free (LilyPond) or cheap (Lime).
Maybe it's just that the musicians' culture hasn't gotten hip to free information. I guess musicians are so used to getting ripped off by record companies, etc., that they are in defense mode, and won't even consider setting their music free?
The Assayer [theassayer.org] - free-information book reviews
Re:OLGA is running fine now... (Score:2)
Well, yeah, you're violating the law if you share those transcriptions with friends. (No, it doesn't violate the law if you only use the transcription yourself.) So it sounds like you think the current copyright law is immoral and should be changed. I'd encourage you to do some political activism on this issue.
Personally, what I think is really immoral about copyright law is the ridiculous lengths of the copyright terms. Unfortunately, Disney et al. have good lobbyists, who are making sure that Disney can retain the Winnie the Pooh copyrights for as long as possible.
Of course you're right. It's not a joke when people say that Charlie Parker could have sued every musician in the last fifty years if he'd wanted to invoke the copyright laws. But please don't try to claim that things are legal when they're really illegal. If the law is wrong, the thing to do is change the law, not pretend it doesn't exist.
It also sounds like you think music should be treated differently than other forms of expression like books and paintings. I think that's wrong -- art forms overlap, so it's not even possible to draw strict legal distinctions between them. And I don't see what moral argument would apply to one form and not to others. I think an across-the-board info-anarchist position like Ian Clarke's has more self-consistency than what you're saying.
The Assayer [theassayer.org] - free-information book reviews
Re:Of all the formats... Lilypond?! (Score:3)
Do you have any facts to back up this claim? Compatible with what? The music notation software notation used by most serious musicians and composers is called Finale, and unfortunately Finale uses a proprietary version of a format called ETF. The documentation for the format is only available to people who have bought Finale. The only good news is that the Mutopians reverse-engineered ETF and wrote a program to convert ETF to LilyPond. (I forgot where they had this...anyone know the URL?) So most serious musicians could work with LilyPond if they knew the conversion software existed.
As far as support for NIFF, correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK, the only free notation software that supports NIFF is Neume [sourceforge.net], which isn't complete yet.
The Assayer [theassayer.org] - free-information book reviews
Re:Where is this music free ? (Score:2)
Easy.
Les Paul and his trio/ Les Paul and Mary Ford.
Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grapelli
Gershwin, Ira and George
Berlin, Irving
Robert Johnson
Big Bill Broonzy
Blind Lemon Jefferson
and others.
all over 70 years.
In my cd player at this moment is Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Gudonov.
Either you failed at music appreciation class or were one of the poor souls who didn't bother to take it. Your loss.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Re:Original, you need an original. (Score:2)
Now, it's different when the copyrights start changing hands all over the place.
copyrights are to protect the content creators.. which is why it's cool for Jay Ward (or his family) to own Rocky and Bullwinkle.
Paul McCartney owns Buddy Holly's catalog, as well as John Phillip Sousa's catalog, but not the same as the following examples:
Michael Jackson owns Paul McCartney's (okay, the Beatles Northern Songs) catalog.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Re:Where is this music free ? (Score:2)
I guess I was responding to the notion that older music (even if it's as recent as the 20th century) has no value.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Another free music site . . . (Score:1)
Re:Copyright question. (Score:1)
In the other article [uga.edu] noted by the anonymous contributor Professor Heald proposes a number of legal actions that might be taken against those who claim payment for a bogus copyright. He seems to consider false advertising charges to be fairly promising, but I've never heard of this approach being used in the way Professor Heald proposes.
Don't forget the Mudcat/Digital Tradition (Score:1)
The Mudcat Discussion Forum [mudcat.org] contains links to the Digital Tradition, a sort of Project Gutenberg for (mainly) public domain song lyrics. Some of the lyrics are linked to MIDI sequences, and a careful search of the forum archives can turn up many one-line melodies in ABC notation.
Re:Seventy Years? (Score:2)
American creators anticipate that their copyrights will serve as important sources of income for their children
the composer's daughter, remains extremely active in publishing and exploiting her father's music
Excuse me? I find the logic in this quote to be severly lacking. What right, exactly, is being upheld by allowing children to milk the creative efforts of their parents for profit long after their death? Who's interests are being served here?
This just proves to me that the only point of these copyright "laws" is to return our society to some sort of medieval caste system in which everything a person may hold as their own is determined by something as vaporous as "birthright". This benefits only a select few at the expense of many, and I find it reprehensible.
We are supposed to have moved beyond this sort of situation in which the undeserving yet well-born are given a leg up on everyone else. This is not fair and it is not equality. If government refuses to pass laws to promote equality amongst all peoples, then it becomes the duty of the right-thinking to violate government whim in direct opposition to their bourgeois policies.
I will continue my long crusade against all forms of copyright by utilizing Napster, Gnutella, Freenet, and any other source of revenue-harming protest I can.
Seventy Years? (Score:3)
From the website:
Seventy years after a composer dies, the copyright on his work expires and anyone can copy it.
Am I the only one who thinks 70 years is a ridiculous amount of time for a dead person to hold onto a copyright? Hell, what is the purpose of musical copyright in the first place?
Music, like digital information, is nothing more than a specific arrangement of a finite number of symbols. The entire concept that someone can "own" a particular grouping of symbols is at best ludicrous.
Re:Seventy Years? (Score:2)
Damn, I'm impressed. I never expected to see or hear arguments from politicians or government documents that are so lucid and compelling.
(I'm just making a comment on an impression I just had and the contrast it brought to light against my cynical frustrated stereotypical views of politicians and government bureaucracy. My statement is not a representation of my current thoughts on this issue itself...)
If a decent fraction of them didn't do or say or stand for so many stupid things in the public limelight, and if stuff like this was actually 'seen and felt' by the common citizen, there might be a smidgen more appreciation for politicians and government in general.
Re:Seventy Years? (Score:2)
Movies (Score:2)
Re:Of all the formats... Lilypond?! (Score:2)
Note, incidentally, that PDF is not really a binary format. It's a text format that has some facilities for in-line compression. But if you want to, you can type in a PDF file completely in text form and not lose any functionality.
Re:Seventy Years? (Score:2)
Actually, most of the great works of music were produced with little or no copyright protection at all. I'd be perfectly satisfied if all future generations of US musicians were such slackers as Mozart, Bach, or Handel.
Instead, our tough copyright laws give us such ``quality'' as Madonna, Britney Spears, and the Jacksons. The good, less popular stuff merely falls by the wayside and disappears from circulation, since it is locked up by the same copyright laws that those packaged products demand. That seems like a lose-lose deal to me.
this ROCKS (Score:2)
On the downside, why is everything an FTP link? I'd really like to click on a MIDI or PNG link and have it just play/show--as it is I have to download the MIDI or score and view it "manually".
Also, can anyone answer me this: I download lilypond a few weeks ago (along with a million other required packages). Finally got it all installed and lilypond just crashes. Boom, it dies. Is there a mailing list or FAQ or something?
--
MailOne [openone.com]
Now if only . . . (Score:2)
--
Re:Sheet music, meet socialism. (Score:2)
Re:Seventy Years? (Score:2)