On 01/23/2014 08:17 AM, Tres Finocchiaro wrote: > I feel "Owl City - Fireflies" is a fantastic candidate for > consideration to LMMS sample projects and I feel I've made the case that > it falls under the "fair use" clause. - Do others agree that it should > be included? - If so, should we move forward and get permission from the > 3 authors?
1. I don't think it should be included with LMMS because I would hope anything included with LMMS would be under a free license. Inclusion of Fireflies certainly violates the Debian Free Software Guidelines, for example, and may get LMMS removed (or maybe they would just include a patch that omits Fireflies from the package). Further, if someone gets LMMS, doesn't realize Fireflies was a hit song (I would never have known it existed, myself, if I didn't sit next to someone at a client site who runs a radio all day on a top 40 station; I've literally heard it nowhere else), uses the sample project as a base and comes up with something else that became a hit, they could be sued for making a derivative commercial work. I don't think you want (or should want) to put your users in that position, so I think only stuff that can be licensed under CC-BY or similar, if not dedicated to the public domain, should be included. 2. Why would you feel you need to get permission from the 3 people who arranged the song in LMMS if you don't feel you need to get permission from the original copyright holder? Does copyright only count if it's held by some guy using a one-word pseudonym on the Internet? If lifting the entire melody and arrangement from a hit song is "fair use", wouldn't lifting someone else's arrangement be as well? For the record, I think the US copyright system in its current state sucks ass. When people are still getting sued for performing "Happy Birthday", a melody written literally 121 years ago with words published 102 years ago, it's clearly abusive. But it exists, and free software needs to work within it. Rob ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ CenturyLink Cloud: The Leader in Enterprise Cloud Services. Learn Why More Businesses Are Choosing CenturyLink Cloud For Critical Workloads, Development Environments & Everything In Between. Get a Quote or Start a Free Trial Today. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=119420431&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ LMMS-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/lmms-devel
