I'm interested in others' perspectives on this topic integral to our passion. I've had a few very brief interactions with other callers on this topic but would appreciate a wider view with an eye towards commonly agreed acceptable practice. We live in a world that has the dichotomy of very strong legal concepts of "ownership" and yet at the same time the dance community carries on a more open heredity of sharing and the folk process in order to benefit us all.
As I became interested in calling, I started to do a fair amount of capture from live calling with occasional "asks" to the caller for clarification/confirmation of my capture (at a convenient point in the program for them). Often they would just hand me their card. In one case an established caller offered a stack of "easy" dances to a group of us at a shared caller night which was very helpful to gain some known entities. Nowadays if a caller offers their card I usually simply take a photo of it with my cell phone to respect their time and transcribe from that later. Lately I've been doing a couple of other things to capture dances: gaining clarification from YouTube videos for trickier choreography I've seen live or leveraging positive mentions of dance names on lists like this to trigger a YouTube search for original capture. If folks ask me to look at a card when I'm calling I'll gladly share it. However, I'm a bit uneasy when they ask for more than a couple and from my experience on the other side it appears others around me feel similarly. (I once had the unusual experience of a caller unknown to me asking for one card which I handed over and then came back from socializing during the break to find her rifling through and copying from my card deck on stage - seemed to think that was perfectly normal behavior!) I've not posted another composer's work (with the exception of one dance commissioned for my daughter) as I feel this is crossing the line. However, I have noted several collections of dances posted on the web by folks other than the authors - in some cases they assert they have permission to do so and others are mum. I have copied from several of these in the past but now steer away from "no permission expressed" ones. So I've kinda boiled this down to a tentative personal code of sharing: - OK to gather from primary sources on my own work (live dance, YouTube videos, etc.) - OK to gather first hand from another caller's offered card or follow up message, whether their own work or of another composer - OK to gather from web publication or books expressing permission, or posted by the author - Before copyright works/chestnuts open game and OK - OK to offer my own compositions as I like in any form - OK to share others' compositions in a one-on-one on request fashion - Not cool to hoover up another caller's deck in big gulps (at least at an event or without offer) or to be expected to give likewise - Grey area: sharing another's composition in response to a request on a list post (as opposed to an off-list one-on-one email, or a link to an existing acceptable on-line resource) - No Way: publishing a list of other's compositions, without the expressed permission of the author, in any form. I freely offer that some of the distinctions may or may not make sense to others, but feels right to me in this environment. The grey area one above would probably be stifling to several of the choreography review and criticism threads which are otherwise very helpful were it made "not OK." I'd love to hear what others think!
