Let me start by saying I have zero legal background. However, I've been in a band whose output was mostly cover songs, and we did look into our distribution options. I also made and distributed a hack of a very popular then-17-year-old video game in the late '90s; there was some fallout, and after that I educated myself. I would encourage anyone with an interest in this subject to do the same.
On 01/23/2014 08:57 AM, Tres Finocchiaro wrote: > I would ask Matt Groening to use his picture of the Mona Lisa well > before trying to hunt down da Vinci's proprietors. ... because, in this > case his The Mona Lisa is something like 500 years old. The current copyright system is ridiculous, but not that ridiculous. She's fair game, and has certainly been appropriated, deconstructed and otherwise reused, as with any popular work that's fallen into the public domain (if copyright even existed in da Vinci's day). The Mona Lisa is like the poster girl for the public domain working as intended. "Fireflies" is not 500 years old. It's less than 5 years old, certainly still under copyright. A better analogy would be Shepard Fairey's appropriation of an Associated Press photo for a campaign poster for the person depicted in that photo, ultimately resulting in criminal charges against the artist despite his very substantial changes to the original work. > work represents *but does not directly copy the original*. He's > operating under fair use as is the 3 mentioned artists. I would get his > permission, since it's HIS EXACT COPY that I'm seeking to use. You understand there are multiple copyrights in a recorded work, right? There's the mechanical rights (the melody itself) and the performance rights (the actual sound recording, or "HIS EXACT COPY" in your parlance). Even if you just recorded a plain acoustic piano rendition of the melody to Fireflies, or even transcribed it to sheet music or the piano roll, while it wouldn't infringe the performance rights you'd still need a mechanical license. Others have suggested the use of a compulsory license. That covers only the mechanical rights, and would require payment of a fee for each copy of LMMS anyone distributes. It's a very small fee (less than a penny) but I'm sure you can see how that isn't an option either, since the GPL forbids restrictions on redistribution by those who receive your code, and part of that is to specifically allow commercial use (as long as the terms of the GPL are fulfilled -- you can sell the program, but you need to provide the source). https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLCommercially While the project file may not be covered by the GPL, most of LMMS is, so distributing a project with strings attached as part of the default LMMS tarball (or packages based on it) isn't really an option. Even if the guys who made the cover did change the melody significantly, trying to claim it's a different work when it's still named "Fireflies" and is essentially the same song isn't really going to change anything. Remixes usually require royalty payments and derivative works are still infringing. > Here's a side-by-side of Wine's notepad.exe and Windows 8's > notepad.exe. [image: Inline image 2] I don't do HTML email so that's all I see of your images, but regardless, graphic user interfaces were held to not be copyrightable in Apple v. Microsoft in the '90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corporation Specific design elements are copyrightable, and indeed, over the years many creators of free UI themes that came too close to OS X (especially the red/yellow/green glassy window management buttons) have gotten legal threats from Apple. I'm sure that if LibreOffice replaced all their menus with a ripoff of Microsoft's "ribbon", they'd get some nastygrams as well. (Copying icons is bad too; the one bit of good news for Apple in that lawsuit was that a third-party desktop included a trashcan icon that was too close to Apple's graphic.) But merely having a big text area and some menus isn't copyrightable; almost every text editor of the last 30 years has that basic design, from emacs to gedit to notepad to the GEOS text editor on my Commodore 64 in 1985. For that matter, menu layouts aren't protected either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_v._Borland Computer code, UI layout, music and visual arts are four different fields, often treated very differently by legislators, judges and juries, and each with their own licensing regimes. I've obviously downloaded the Fireflies project and I definitely understand the appeal of saying "look, you can duplicate a popular song with LMMS and a bit of work". That was how they promoted tracker programs back in my Amiga days; I started using them when I heard someone's irreverent yet dead-on cover of "Beat Box" by Art of Noise. Why wouldn't you want to do that? But making such a cover song available with no specific license on a free site with no ads is a whole different ballgame compared to including it by default in a free software package that's included in many Linux distributions, some of which are available commercially and could be financially devastated by its inclusion if some asshat lawyer at UMG (owner of Fireflies) cared enough. 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
