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lucasgonze / william-litten-fiddle-tunes

William Litten's Fiddle Tunes 1800-1802
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License for transcriptions of public domain sheet music #12

Closed mlinksva closed 1 year ago

mlinksva commented 1 year ago

Taking @lucasgonze's suggestion to open an issue.

@mindspillage's comment:

I don't really see how Apache 2 makes sense here for a transcription/scan of this type, where the source material is in the public domain (a thing I have done with music myself several times! for example: https://musescore.com/user/14046666/scores/5351837 ) and the best option would be some sort of acknowledgement of that.

I probably should know but don't the extent to which such transcriptions are subject to copyright restrictions and where. If it's ambiguous and wants to release under a conditional license, specifically Apache-2.0, adding notice about the underlying work's public domain status to the NOTICE file may perhaps be funny and/or pragmatic?

lucasgonze commented 1 year ago

I like very much the idea of documenting the scope of the claim. In my README for The Galley Slave I documented what I knew about the status of the rights, including the results of a search for likely holders. What I didn't do was an examination of what was and wasn't covered.

It would be good to have a real actual attorney help with that. Who do we know who thinks about music and the public domain? Ideally it would be somebody who understands the musical choices.

lucasgonze commented 1 year ago

From IMSLP footer:

Content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License

From the FAQ there:

a Creative Commons or Performance Restricted license

The their main page on licenses:

The possible licenses that are permissible on IMSLP:

Scans of old printed or manuscript music: NONE - public domain only. Manuscript scans (composers dead over 70 years): NONE - public domain only. (unless first published less than 25 years ago) (Re)Typesets: cc zero 1.0, cc by 4.0, cc by-sa 4.0, cc by-nc 4.0, cc by-nc-sa 4.0 and cpdl 4.0. Original or Copyrighted Compositions: One of the Creative Commons or Performance Restricted licenses. Recordings: One of the Creative Commons licenses.

On thinking more about IMSLP, it is an excellent fit for sheet music like William Litten's, except that it is oriented towards classical music and not folk or roots. This orientation does matter.

There DO exist good projects for folk or roots music, but they do a bad job with digital transcriptions and long-term source control. These projects need some parts of IMSLP, but they need to keep the musicology to themselves.

lucasgonze commented 1 year ago

On thinking more about Kat's original comment, I have added an acknowledgment of the public domain status of the original musical work to NOTICE.md. She suggests that there is nothing else copyrightable here, but I disagree. Where there is room for interpretation, there is an opportunity for lawyers to do mischief.

I'm going to stick with APL2, as originally chosen.