To: (Giddily Lotro) Subject: Re: copyright References: af7981450707211244q468c2f6dub1af40fad8612b8d@mail.gmail.com Message-ID: af7981450707211244q468c2f6dub1af40fad8612b8d@mail.gmail.com | Hi John, | There has been a discussion on the game forums regarding the abc songs. | Which, could impact my site. The great transcribers are in a huff about | copyright infringement and are taking their songs off the forum. As of yet, | they haven't asked me to take them off the site. | | I'm unsure of the legality of this and have written a paragraph on the song | page asking for legal advice. The songs you have on your site are all folk | type with no composer copyrights (I believe). I don't think there would be | an issue with transcribing classical or folk songs. However, so many are | more current. Enya, Memory of Trees, and other songs from live | composers/artists. Where is the line? | | The songs that are transcribed to abc are originally obtained from web sites | with no copyright notification for downloading their midi or sheet music. | But there is no way of knowing if what they have is pirated. I just have no | clue as to the legality of having my site up with all these songs (been | working on a database driven site and almost done). Hoping you might have | some knowledge on this or could point me to a site or somewhere for the | advice I need. The abcusers forum has had a number of discussions of this, but the situation is extremely murky. This is what you'd expect in a lay discussion of a legal issue, of course. To a great extent, the only real answer seems to be "Well, try taking them to court, and see what the courts in your area say." Needless to say, this would be far too expensive in both money and time, so it hasn't been much done. Yet another summary I've seen is that when computers get involved, all precedent is forgotten and everything needs to be relearned from scratch. With legal questions, we're dealing with a legal system that is mostly clueless about computers and tends to totally misunderstand the issues, resulting in really boneheaded results that we'll obviously need to fight again and again until the legal system "gets it". Consider that you probably have lots of copyrighted documents on your disk, especially in your browser's cache. If you make backups of your home directory, many corporate lawyers would think you're engaged in copyright infringement. This is absurd, of course, but few lawyers or judges have any idea what a backup is or why you'd do it. The US Congress did exempt backups from copyright rules, but it's still an issue. For example, if your computer dies and you load your backup to a new computer, is that copyright infringement? We don't know, and can't until either Congress or the courts tell us. ABC notation is an interesting case. My site, like most others, has a lot of "new folk" tunes that are copyrighted. It's essentially impossible to detect them all, because musicians often have no idea where a tune originated, and often believe that newly-composed tunes are "traditional". Most of the online ABC lacks attribution, and there's no practical way to look tunes up in any legal database to discover who might own it. Actually, the ABC user community has reported a few cases where they were able to fight back against a bogus copyright claim. The scenario is: Someone reports on a mailing list that they got a letter demanding that they remove a tune from their web site, but they think that the tune is too old to be coyrighted, so does anyone know anything about when and where it was published? A few days later, they are able to reply to the publisher saying "That tune was published by So-and-so in London in 1738 in the "..." publication; how do you claim that you own it?" The publisher is never heard from again. Presumably their lawyer pointed out that they have committed fraud, their intended victim has the evidence in writing, and if they press it, they can potentially lose big. So they move on to some other victim. I've asked a few people at a some music publishers about this. The question I ask is: I have a tune in my head; how can I find out if it's copyrighted, so I can ask permission to use it? The answer I've gotten from them all, apparently written "with a straight face", is that I should buy a copy of all the music they've ever published and search through it for the tune. There is a certain lack of practicality in this. But it's their answer. For things printed in the US, you could go to the Library of Congress, which has copies of most of the music printed in the US. But it could take you a few years of full-time work to locate any specific tune, so again this isn't really a practical solution. Some of the LoC is online, but not much, and it's not very usable to a musician looking for a tune. If you know who published it when and where, you can find it easily; if you just know the tune, all you can do is an exhaustive search. And this only finds things published in the US; you'd have to visit other archives for the rest of the world. The only really effective way to discover if a tune is copyrighted is to use (publish, perform or record) it and wait to see if anyone sues you. Then, because a lot of copyright claims are bogus, you must go through with the court case (and appeals) to see if their copyright claim is valid. Again, it takes a lot of time and money. I've never been sued for any of the copyrighted tunes on my site. There is a sort of defensive strategy that people have worked out. One part is, of course, to try to locate any information about a tune that you can, and include what you find in the ABC headers. The Fiddler's Companion site (www.ibilio.org/fiddlers/) is a good resource here. Andrew, the site's owner, is always looking for more information, and gets a lot of it from email, so please help him out if you know something about a tune that he doesn't. But the main thing we've worked out is to scatter disclaimers around your site saying that some of the material may be copyrighted, and if a tune's owner objects to it being online, give an email address they should write to, so the tune can be removed. Also, I like to add that an alternative is to send copyright and contact information (an email or web address), and it will be added to the ABC headers. You might be surprised at the results this gets. I've contacted maybe a hundred or so tune owners, and so far only one has asked to have their tune removed (which I did). Most of the rest start with "What's this ABC stuff?" So I send a very brief summary of the notation. I mention that I like to include any attribution or history of a tune that I can find, so they should send me any such info that they have. And there are ABC header lines for listing sheet-music publications and recordings, which would also be welcome. And I add that I'd like them to proofread my version of a tune, and send any corrections they like, so I can get the "real" version. By this time, most tune owners have realized that ABC is really just a compact "fake-book" sort of notation, and with the copyright and contact info, it would be good advertising. So they give me all the information and permission to "publish" the tune as ABC. I'm happy to get the information, musicians who use the ABC know how to contact the owner, and the tune gets a bit more exposure among musicians. I really should contact that one person who asked me to remove a tune. It's a really good tune, and the musicians I play with no longer use it because it's no longer easy to find online. Maybe they'd be willing to let me "publish" it now. Anyway, I wouldn't suggest that people pull their ABC transcriptions out of a vague fear. This is giving up without trying to find a way, and loses what is clearly a valuable addition to our communal knowledge. If people had done this in general, there would be no Internet, because nearly every new thing on the Net has always been challenged as illegal at first. Back in the 80's, there were extensive discussions of whether email was legal, and a lot of people thought it probably wasn't. Rather than abandoning a good new idea because the legal system doesn't understand it, what we should do is put things online and be as reasonable about is as we can. Chances are that a lot of it will turn out to be legal, once the legal folks understand it and see the benefits. But if we just take things offline, we'll never have a chance to explore the benefits. I've been thinking that this question has come up so often that I really should write up a more thorough essay about what I know and put it online ... (Oh, BTW, does my Tune Finder know about the tunes you're talking about? If not, send me some URLs. And feel free to excerpt or paraphrase anything here. ;-)