Re: Musicology with Lilypond (and now correct attachments ;-)

[mason]

On 10/29, Urs Liska wrote:
> Well, the LSR website explicitly states that it's contents is in the
> public domain. If I read correctly your email this would have to be
> considered illegal, especially given that many snippets there are
> uploaded not by their original authors but by someone who uses the
> results of a mailing list discussion 

Like Andrew B says, it would probably take an international copyright
lawyer to really sort out the legal status of the LSR.  Saying that
something is public domain doesn't just make it so.  My understanding is
that unless the copyright has expired or the work has otherwise entered
the public domain, all rights are exclusively reserved until the author
gives up those right.  Unless LSR contributors agree to this at some
point during the upload process, they reserve all rights to their code.
Even if contributors are asked to release their work into the "public
domain", that would be legally ambiguous.  The purpose of CC0 is to
resolve this ambiguity.  If the intent is public domain-like status,
contributors should be asked to release their work under CC0.  Even
then, if you are correct that many snippets were uploaded by someone
other than the original author, then the uploaders don't even have the
power to release the code under CC0 without permission from the author.

> Is there anything that should be done about the LSR?

Clarifying the unclear licensing terms retroactively would likely be
such a large task that it is probably not worth attempting unless legal
problems are likely to arise in practice, and since I'm sure that most
snippet authors intended for their code to be free, I doubt that this
will happen.

Moving forward though, it would probably be good to ensure that for
similar projects (such as OLL's snippets) contributions are clearly
under free licenses (ideally GPL-compatible[1] ones, so that the
snippets can be freely combined with Lilypond and/or Frescobaldi).

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses

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