Karl Dallas writes: | As an interesting sidelight, I use ABC primarily as a composition tool | on my Palm-compatible Treo PDA. If I were to distribute my tunes in ABC | format, anyone transcribing them into conventional staff notation might | well have a right in law to claim copyright. So I better not!
Somehow this doesn't sound right. Copyright law is supposed to encourage publishing original material, not to scare people out of publishing. We'd get it all straightened out sooner if people put their compositions online and weren't intimidated like this. Probably all that is needed in most of the world is something like: C: Karl Dallas N: Copyright 2002 by Karl Dallas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> You might also want to encourage people to play your tunes by using a line like: N: Permission granted for noncommercial use. This tells people that they can play your music in the usual "fair use" manner. And if they want to use it in a recording, they have your email address. If you have more than one email address, you might want to include all of them, and a URL if you have one. This makes your music easily available, and tells musicians how to reach you if they want to ask for permission (or send you criticism ;-). Unless you're going up against a really rich and nasty corporation that sees profits in stealing your music, this should be sufficient to convince most corporate lawyers that they should advise their employers to just pay you rather than steal your music. You might also want dated printouts of the tunes, for when you need to take some nasty corporation to court. One of the problems still to be solved is the instability of email addresses. If someone has your tune and 10 years from now wants to contact you about it, will the email address work? Probably not, if it's through a commercial ISP. If you're associated with a college or university, you may have a long-term email address through them. I've had an email address at MIT that has worked for nearly 20 years now, and will almost certainly work in another 20 years. The value of this is something that the commercial world doesn't seem to understand, and is a real problem with publishing online. But then, the academic culture has long been much more friendly to authors and composers than has the corporate culture. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
