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Mutopia: Where Music is Free
rabalde writes "Check the Mutopia project. In the same spirit of the beloved Project Gütenberg,
but consists of a growing collection of free music.
The essence of Mutopia is that of a growing number of musical scores all typeset using GNU Lilypond by volunteers. All the music is downloadable for free as Postscript (.ps) and PDF (.pdf) files , as well as Lilypond's own LY (.ly) file format."
I wonder how long it will take for the likes of ASCAP and perhaps even the RIAA to bring a challenge to this. You never know, the relatives of J. S. Bach might bring lawsuits as well. While I've never agreed with the antics of the RIAA and the MPAA, I've also never been able to bring myself to agree with projects such as this one. By downloading music like this off of the Internet, you are denying -- in a very real way -- a profit to many companies who would otherwise benefit from your capital.
.. without the sheets!
.. download your sheet music for free, but don't be surprised when the paper music lobby kicks in your door and drags you off to the clink for denial of profit.
Think of who is in play here. It's not just the composers (the ASCAP and their vast legal army.) It's advertisers. And don't forget the paper corporations. Do you think that the CEOs of these large and powerful paper corporations are going to stand for this? Why should the head of Hammermill sit idly by after he finds out that people are able to download sheet music
Don't get me wrong, I am not terribly opposed to this idea. But you can bet your ass that a lot of powerful special interests will be. And we have seen what happens when powerful special interests collide with "the little guy." So go ahead
-- Dale
Expiring copyrights at the time of copyright holder's death creates incentive to kill the copyright owner. The 70 year delay eliminates this incentive.
Gutenberg is a committed effort run by enthusiastic volunteers, with one *very* enthusiastic volunteer at the center. Exactly like all the successful projects on the internet. No monks needed.
--
--
You're full of bullshit. The purpose of copyright law is to encourage creators to publish their work, knowing that they can expect to make a living from it. Granted, the seventy year thing is a little out of line but come on, that's not the purpose of copyright.
We are supposed to have moved beyond this sort of situation in which the undeserving yet well-born are given a leg up on everyone else. This is not fair and it is not equality.
Life isn't fair and it isn't equal either. Besides, who are you to stop someone from passing on their wealth and possessions to their children? It's a basic right.
If government refuses to pass laws to promote equality amongst all peoples, then it becomes the duty of the right-thinking to violate government whim in direct opposition to their bourgeois policies.
Oh, brother...
I will continue my long crusade against all forms of copyright by utilizing Napster, Gnutella, Freenet, and any other source of revenue-harming protest I can.
Fine. But you're not doing this because of the seventy year stipulation of copyright law. You're doing it because you don't believe in intellectual property. And that is entirely different.
IANAL either, but I believe that an Urtext edition will suffice. But you can't reproduce the preface or footnotes.
This _is_ an decentralized set of contributors.
You have have texts you'd like to contribute? Take part!
-j
I forget what 8 was for.
On the downside, why is everything an FTP link? I'd really like to click on a MIDI or PNG link and have it just play/show--as it is I have to download the MIDI or score and view it "manually".
Did you set up your browser to view
Finally got it all installed and lilypond just crashes.
Again, please submit a bugreport. Your description is too vague to be useful.
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
We don't have any operas, but you can find a 50 page orchestral score done in LilyPond at GMD. I'm not sure why Mats didn't put it up at mutopia, though. We also have the full ouverture Coriolan (by Van Beethoven), included in the lilypond package--unfortunately, there is no rendered version on the web right now.
Why would anyone waste time entering stuff into Lilypond's clumsy 1960's-era notation when they could use something like Finale, which at least approaches the efficiency of Mozart and Rossini's scratchings with a quill pen?
I am not really qualified to judge (never used Finale), but from what I've heard it is quite tedious to use, and finetuning formatting is at least as big a nightmare as tweaking a .ly file. Moreover, one could enter music in finale, and then convert it to .ly.
The way I see it, the two big barriers are:
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
When I started LilyPond, I felt that there had to be a good justification for the existence of LilyPond, so I wrote a little document about a PD sheet-music archive to be called "Mutopia". Some years later, we had gathered too many test-scores in the lilypond package, and decided to host them in a separate archive. I called for volunteers to set this up. Chris Sawer (to whom I owe a big thanks!) made the site that's featured in this article.
Of course, I wanted the files to be usable with free-software, so using Sibelius or Finale was out of the question. There are some other options, like the ABC format, but they have more technical limitations.
Anyway, LilyPond format is flexible (I wrote several convertors to it, among others a Finale to .ly convertor) and Lily also dumps the output as a nicely quantized MIDI file, which is rather easy to import into other programs.
When it comes to music representation there aren't any good published standards: the problem with NIFF is not that it is binary per se, but rather that it is quite limited, and has a tendency to glue together musical and graphical information into a big blob. Also, there aren't any free score editors that support NIFF.
As for SMDL, I don't think that there exists any software that can meaningfully handle SMDL.
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
C'mon. That's just silly. If somebody produces a work at say, 25, and die at 75, they'll have had 50 years earning royalties to leave to their children. If this music is still purchased with sufficient regularity after 50 years to make collecting royalties worthwhile, surely it will already have made more than enough money to justify writing the song. Very, very few composers will ever write music that will be played long after their death. Look at, say, the big band music of the 1940's. How much of that is still played regularly today? A couple of dozen tunes, maybe?
Additionally, you're assuming that greater rewards are going to lead to better music. While greater rewards might leave a composer more time to spend on each piece, beyond that I doubt that it makes any difference. Great composers aren't generally motivated by money, any more than great software designers.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
If the artist is dead, what difference does it make to them?
True to some extent, but perhaps not as much as it was. However, why does that entitle their descendants to windfall profits?
It's not *one* company that would earn the profits. If copyright lapsed, it would be anybody with a printing press who wanted to run them off. In any case, I don't think my hypothetical grown grandchildren really deserve any money from the book. They didn't write it - I did. And, obviously, if I didn't attempt to publish the book, money wasn't the motivating factor for writing it.
In any case, this is a very rare situation. The situation where this becomes important is immensely popular copyrighted works such as the old Disney movies, and music such as Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue. All of these have already earned massive amounts of money for the copyright holders, and have become part of our history and culture. How long are large corporations going to earn a rake-off on these works?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I'm just curious... What instruments do you play? Can I catch your gigs someplace? Wrote any songs lately? Or, more importantly, have you tried making a living writing and performing music?
I know people who do, and what they make is completely out of proportion to the amount of time, effort and dedication required to become any good at it.
And stop whining.
Don't want to pay for the Happy Birthday song? Write your own birthday song, or find a musician to write one for you, and sell you the rights.
Next time I'm in Minneapolis, I'll try to catch your show. That's a promise.
/your/ songs, and sold 10,000,000 copies of that? While I can see why someone might not have a problem with that, I can also see why some people would want to have some control over their works. Copyright law gives them that control, if they want it.
Anyway, it's up to the copyright holder to draw the line. Nobody charges you money for singing Happy Birthday at home, but if N'Sync covered it, and sold 10,000,000 copies of it (I shudder at the thought...), don't you think the authors should have the option of being compensated? What if N'Sync covered one of
Now, how exactly do you draw the conclusion that widespread use of a work somehow makes it ok to deprive the author from the rights to her work? This amounts to saying "Yes, you can make money on music, but only as much as we allow". Fair use in copyright law already allows most uses you're thinking of, and common sense on most copyright holders' part makes the rest of them fine, too. Nobody sends lawyers to kids' birthday parties to stop those rascals from singing Happy Birthday. At least I'm not aware of anyone doing so.
Everybody and their dog knows that a zombie of buried composer may rise from the dead within 70 years from death and demand their copy rights. Where you're from, Mongolia?
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
An object, like carved-in-stone information, is nothing more than a specific arrangement of a finite number of particles. The entire concept that someone can "own" a particular grouping of particles is at best ludicrous.
(I agree with you about the 70 year thing, and the purpose of copyright is to allow the creator to not have his/her work stolen from him/her by someone else like a big corporation. Things change, eh?)
Bitchslapped. Neat.
Same reason the waiters and waitresses at restauraunts always "sing" or shout some stupid "yeah, it's your birthday! Your birthday! your birthday! Yeah! Yeah! Whooooo!" song instead of Happy Birthday.
The restaurants would get sued otherwise. Evil, evil, evil.
On a related topic - you know Disney will pay whatever it takes - millions of dollars if neccessary - to bribe Congress to extend copyright again. They will never allow Mickey Mouse to enter the public domain.
The only hope is campaign finance reform.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Am I the only one who thinks 70 years is a ridiculous amount of time for a dead person to hold onto a copyright?
Yes, probably.
Hell, what is the purpose of musical copyright in the first place?
To provide motivation for artists to publish their works by giving them a limited monopoly on them.
Music, like digital information, is nothing more than a specific arrangement of a finite number of symbols. The entire concept that someone can "own" a particular grouping of symbols is at best ludicrous.
They don't "own" the music. They own the copyright to a piece of music. Sigh......
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
called sarcasm.
Could they have made SMDL any less accessible to the casual, interested party?
Seems like a lot of the info is out of date (e.g. predictions that SMDL will likely be adopted by ISO in late 1996). The only link to a draft is in postscript format from a (for me) unresponsive ftp site.
SMDL also sounds like it wants an import tool or at least some kind of pretty interface for score writing--I can just imagine how horrendous transcribing a score manually would be in SMDL! SMDL isn't just for scores, right? It's supposed to be able to describe
Anyway, I found this link: XML and Music which had some other ventures in the music markup arena.
In principle, a text/ASCII markup sounds preferable to a binary format, IMHO.
dammit, meant to hit preview, not submit :P
nevermind that incomplete sentence in the post previous and here's that link again:
Here's the link again:
http://xml.coverpages.org/xmlMusic.html
The Mutopia project only accepts entries which are not under copyright, primarily older works which have fallen out of copyright.
I believe his name was Gutenberg, not Gütenberg.
-jfedor
Now, IANAL, but unless the people who submit scores to the site created them by looking at the composer's original scores, I assume that sooner or later some lawyer will go after them for copyright infringement.
Am I being too paranoid? If so, why is that most sheet music I've bought has a very prominent 'do not photocopy' sign on its first page? It's not that they can copyright the music itself, but it seems they sure can copyright that particular transcription.
So, if a score contains an extraneous # somewhere, or some extra ligature or something that can be attributed to a specific edition, and you blindly copy it and post it to the site, what do you think your legal position would be?
I know this is a can of worms, and I can understand the book publishers that want to protect their investment (especially if the score in question is an arrangement or a reduction of an orchestral score to a piano score) but at the same time I would love that somebody created a repository with freely available sheet music, so musicologists and enthusiasts would be able to study a composer's work without having to resort to online ordering to find the score they're looking for.
P.S. the last time I bought sheet music I was still living in Europe, so maybe here in North America the 'do not photocopy' signs do not exist
-- the cake is a lie
Moderators? The spelling *is* wrong, so this guy is right. It may not be the most valuable comment, but it's definitely *on-topic*.
I don't know if you're playing devil's advocate here or not. Anyway:
Yes, but copyright is a question of balance between authors' interests and consumers' interests. (And author's interests are extended only to help guarantee that the work gets produced in the first place - ultimately, it all comes down to the public interest.) Specifically, it is most in consumers' interest to have a work in the public domain as soon as possible.
Life of the author plus seventy years seems to shift this balance far too far towards the authors. Also, one can't help but be suspicious when the lobbies for copyright extension include so many large and organized media companies, and the opposition is somewhat ragtag and not nearly as well-financed.
Besides that, it's worth mentioning that the question of what motivates authors and artists to produce work is very far from having a clear answer. My own opinion is that it has a lot more to do with love of their field and desire for fame than it does with leaving their children a healthy inheritance -- they could probably expect better results on that front if they went into, say, accounting.
Puhleeze....
What kind of society will this kind of thinking lead to? I am an amateur musician, and I have made many a transcription (or should I say 'interpretation') of songs I like. I have friends who play as well, and I have no qualms whatsoever in giving them these transcriptions. Am I 'stealing' something now? NO.
Music is still a form of art, no matter what the 'music industry' wants us to believe. It is not a 'product'. Pre-packaged recordings may be 'products', but the music itself (the 'composition') it not. Ask any musician, and (s)he'll probably agree. Unless, of course, they're in it *just* for the money. But in that case their music probably won't be interesting enough to transcribe anyway. There's nothing wrong with *making money* on music, but when it becomes the sole purpose there probably won't be any music worth listening to anyway (right, Dr. Dre?).
Where do you think music comes from? What do you think it means when some musician tells you she has her 'roots' in this and that artist or such and so style? Do you think she means she signed a contract with those artists, a licensing agreement whereby she gained the right to use parts of their 'intellectual property' in her own works? Is that how you want the music of the 21st century to be?
Not me. If I hear a song I like, I'll try to play it. If I like the way it came out, I might write it down. If someone else likes it, they can have it. Sue me...
--frank[at]unternet.org
Why Am I reminded of the Mad's invention of the karaoke machine which only played public domain songs, such as "baa baa black sheep", and "ave maria", to avoid paying royalties?
If NIFF is a flexible as it claims to be, then there's absolutely no reason why a perfect converter couldn't be written to take lilypond input and spit out a NIFF file (and vice versa). If a perfect converter could NOT be written, it displays exactly the reason why the use of the lilypond format is needed: the flexibility to take advantage of a particular implementation's quirks to result in the best possible output.
--
I've contributed a Bach Prelude to the project, and it was definitely a worthwile experience. I hope to contribute again sometime soon.
With regard to its legality, you really ought to read their page dedicated to legal issues: here is the Google-cached version. In a nutshell, there are three sets of copyrights to take into account: The Composer's, the Editor's, and the Typesetter's. The typesetter's doesn't matter, because in this case, the computer (or more specifically, Lilypond) does that. We try to avoid the editor's copyright as well, by (surprise!) inputting from music that isn't edited! These are referred to as "Urtext" versions.
So taking both those things into account, it's perfectly legal to input music from an unedited score if the composer has been dead for at least 70 years.
Now on the technical side, music typesetting is not an exact science, and Lilypond, though mature and under very active development (current release is 1.3.124, I believe), still has its weaknesses. Though much of the output it produces is very readable and usable, sometimes it's less than ideal. You can tweak almost anything, but it often requires knowledge of its complicated implementation (C++ and Guile, I believe). Not only that, but it's SLOW! Typesetting a piece of 8 or 9 pages on my PII-300 96MB RAM takes about a minute, which sucks when you're going back to make small corrections. The run-time increases exponentially (it seems, that's not an exact observation) with more voices and more pages.
Input is done in plain text, in a terse-as-you-can-handle grammar, which is fairly simple to understand, though a bit more complicated once you actually try to assemble all the voices into a completed score. The example that's on the lily home page (I'm guessing it'll be slashdotted before long) is:
\relative c'' { \key c \minor; r8 c16 b c8 g as c16 b c8 d | g,4 }
Which is pretty self-explanitory. Every note is assumed to be the closest note of that name, unless you override (see the last g, the comma means down an octave), every note is assumed to have a duration of the note that came before unless you override, the pipe is a bar check, and it'll warn you if the bar doesn't end up where you told it to be. Really not too difficult, especially if you download an already completed score to base your work on.
The project is fairly small at the moment (42 scores, many of them different movements of the same work), especially compared to Gutenberg, but it can only grow. The biggest problem I've run into is finding unedited copies from which to input.
I'd encourage anyone to contribute! I look forward to the day where there are great archives where you can download expired music for quick reference, or for scholarly curiosity. It'll never replace printed, published music, of course, there's nothing like having a real, bound copy, but it could be great for certain things.
The web page is also available at http://sca.uwaterloo.ca/Mutopia/ (in case www.mutopiaproject.com goes down), though it may be the same machine, I'm not sure.
--
BTW. I remember a story about a Japanese businessman who owned at least 2 Van Gough's painting. He was planning to be cremated with them. Ah the joys of un-restrained capitalism.
You're looking at it from the wrong end. Look at it from the author's standpoint. If her/her descendants will possibly benefit from the work, that person will likely work harder to produce better works, thus benefitting you and me.
--
It's not an assumption I made, but rather an assumption the founding fathers made:
But I'll take a crack at defending it anyway.
While great composers may produce a few truly great and eternal works, on the whole, it's probably the only reasonably skilled workers who produce the greater amount of works. And probably, when you sum it up, the mid-level people probably produce the greatest benefit to society, by using and abusing and fully exploring the inovations of the great ones.
--
both the Berne Convention and the EU directive have accepted the standard that copyright should protect the author and two succeeding generations. Based on the numerous viewpoints presented to the Committee as it has considered these issues, the Committee concludes that the majority of American creators anticipate that their copyrights will serve as important sources of income for their children and through them into the succeeding generation. The Committee believes that this general anticipation of familial benefit is consistent with both the role of copyrights in promoting creativity and the constitutionally based constraint that such rights be conferred for "limited times."
Among the primary justifications asserted for the adoption of the life-plus-70 term under the EU Directive was the conclusion that the life-plus-50 term is no longer sufficient to protect two generations of an author's heirs.
The Register of Copyrights informed the Committee that even for post-1978 works, which are afforded the basic life-plus-50 term of protection, the current term has proven insufficient in many cases to protect a single generation of heirs. For example, Walter Donaldson, who will forever be linked via his songs to the extraordinary success of the 1927 film "The Jazz Singer," composed many of his most famous works when he was in his twenties and died in 1947 while in his fifties. Were the current life-plus-50 term applied at that time, all of his works would fall into the public domain at the end of 1997. Nevertheless, Ellen Donaldson, the composer's daughter, remains extremely active in publishing and exploiting her father's music and in protecting his copyrights. Like the children of composers such as Richard Rogers, Irving Berlin, Richard Whiting, Hoagy Carmichael, and many others, her legitimate interest in her father's copyrights can be expected to continue for decades, and most certainly for the next 20 years.
In order to reflect more accurately Congress' intent and the expectation of America's creators that the copyright term will provide protection for the lifetime of the author and at least one generation of heirs, the bill extends copyright protection for an additional 20 years for both existing and future works.
The Committee is aware of the criticism of the proposed extension by those who suggest that it marks a step down the road of perpetual copyright protection. The Committee is unswayed by this argument for three reasons. First, the greatest obstacle to a perpetual term of copyright protection is the U.S. Constitution, which clearly precludes Congress from granting unlimited protection for copyrighted works. Second, the emerging international standard, to which the bill purports to adhere, and the movement of international copyright law in general are not toward perpetual protection, but to a fixed term of protection based on the death of the author. Third, the principle behind the U.S. copyright term--that it protect the author and at least one generation of heirs--remains unchanged by the bill. The 20-year extension proposed by the bill merely modifies the length of protection in nominal terms to reflect the scientific and demographic changes that have rendered the life-plus-50 term insufficient to meet this aim.
--
It'd be the ot calling the kettle black if I didn't mention that I have some Philip Glass and John Adams in my 1590-disk CD collection but I doubt that's what you meant by relevance.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Actually, that's not a bad idea. Take Lilypond as one of the accepted submission languages, but maintain everything in the repository in one of the more standard formats.
I'm not sure how perfectly convertable they are, though. Converting from NIFF to Lilypond would be lossy at best. Converting the other way is probably like converting from Fortran to C. (Have you ever looked at the output from f2c?)
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
While Coda did withdraw support (though there is an Open Source project which is an ETF to NIFF converter), it is supported by Mark of the Unicorn, Musitek, Musicware (which probably covers most of the non-Finale market), plus some of the most prolific publishers such as Boosey & Hawkes and Hal Leonard.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Naturally, they had to pick the least compatible music notation format there is.
The most compatible is NIFF. It's non-proprietary, and supported by all major music notation software. The only problem is it's a binary format, but then so is PDF. A good cross-platform ASCII format would be SDML, which based on SGML and currently in ISO draft standard status.
After years of pleading with others to stick to published standards, is it too much to hope that we do the same?
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
It gets worse. We geeks often think we're breaking new ground with our hatred of insane copyright law and regulations, but it's been going on for years.
In Australia, performing Grand Right Works (basically anything intended to be performed on stage, such as opera, musical, revue, pantomime or choral work over 20 minutes long) requires paying money to AMCOS, no matter how long the composer has been dead. You heard it right. Performing a Bach Chorale requires paying the copright meisters even though Bach has been dead for 250 years. How can they do this? Simple: if you don't pay them money for these works that are out of copyright, you don't get the rights to copy or perform anything that is under copyright. They have you by the proverbials.
My mother is a music teacher. Music teachers need to bang their collective heads against these ridiculous regulations all the time, because one thing that music teachers do a lot of is get students to perform music, which requires obtaining performing rights, photocopying rights and so forth. She lived in almost perpetual fear of the AMCOS inspectors. At one point (she doesn't do this any more BTW), she kept her cache of photocopied music in the boot (note for Americans: trunk) of her car and only brought into the office that which was needed for that day.
Oh, and just being out of copyright doesn't necessarily help you. I don't know if you've ever read a composer's autograph, but they're often almost illegible. (I know, I edited a Bach's "Musical Offering" once. I should type it up and submit it to Mutopia.) You really need an edited and published version. But editing and publishing slaps a new copyright on that edition.
IMO, if we geeks spoke to musicians and music teachers over the insanity of copyright law, we would find a strong and vocal ally.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
The amount of effort involved in entering a single note of music, using any technology (including a pen), is 2-100 times the effort involved in entering a single character of text. (This is a gut estimate, based on having done a moderate amount of music transcription.) The lower number applies to simple situations such as writing a quarter note, the higher to complex ones that include things like beaming, expression marks, etc. Lilypond is, um, not the most efficient entry method.
I was impressed that a Mozart horn concerto is one of the works that was entered...until I downloaded it and found that it was only the solo part; the orchestral score is missing.
Frankly, this whole thing seems like a bit of silliness to me. Enthusiasm is great, but so is intelligent application of resources. Why would anyone waste time entering stuff into Lilypond's clumsy 1960's-era notation when they could use something like Finale, which at least approaches the efficiency of Mozart and Rossini's scratchings with a quill pen?
Because when it is, I'm telling Lars.
And then you're gonna be in BIG trouble.
Few questions on this:
Can new, original pieces be added to this? What license will they need? Is the street performer's protocol up to scratch?
I'd think it should be easy to do a system (buzzword alert!) , like with p2p, where through UDP you start a connection that streams a track over the internet that others can join in on, or sample or record, resulting in a tree, which at the end of it's branches is low quality, and phased out from the original broadcast by network lag + processing time, and which has as a parent a soloist musician, or a recording with the best quality. Wouldn't be a good way to get good quality jamming material, but would be a feasible way of doing community stuff with music.
So instead of going to the basement and jamming alone after a hard day, you could do it over the internet, with the chance that other people could share what you were doing.
Then you could put resulting public domain (equivalent to GPLed tracks) music on this archive, and anyone could download it. Face it, not everyone now needs sheet music: some need samples too.
Anyway, Great, wonderful, but no license. WHat license do you use for something like this???
Sigh. Yes, I suppose the Mona Lisa is no longer covered by copyright. Unfortunatly, unless you manage to purchase Miss Mona and slap her down on a Xerox, the fact there is no copyright is really meaningless. If someone photographs or copies the Mona Lisa (which I understand is hard to do; No flash, dim lighting) copyright starts all over again.
Same goes for TV music. Say I want to sample a 1920's ragtime for a bit of house. I go out to the store, buy a copy of 'Greastest Ragtime Hits of 1921' on CD. But alas! The copyright date is 1999! Why? Somewhere along the line, an owner of the original recording did a little tweaking to it, say he transferred it from Edison Pressed Celluloid to magnetic tape, and copyright started all over. He sold the rights to his recording to someone else, who ran it through a series of filters to make it sound more lifelike, and copyright started all over again. They do the same thing with TV; Check out the copyright line on, say Rocky and Bullwinkle. It runs late at night on Cartoon Network. That's right, boys and girls, it says "Copyright 1987 Jay Ward Productions"
.sig: Now legally binding!
He bought the right, from the galleries, to photograph the paintings. He also bought the exclusive right to all future conversions of those photographs or future photographs into a digital image for public display. The gallery owns the paintings, and controls what can and cannot be done with them.
On the other hand, if I have copyright on an older photograph of the painting, I can digitize it at will. I hold copyright on that particular image, and not even Billy Boy can bitch at me.
.sig: Now legally binding!
It can not yet go the other way and pull in a midi to produce the typeset output. For as long as I've used Lilypond, there has been a utility called "midi2ly" which converts midi's into the lilypond format.
Anybody know where I could find out about copyrights on jazz standards, like Cole Porter, Ellington, etc? An online, free and legal realbook would be a great thing. I'd definitely contribute time to put them into Lilypond
Verbing wierds language --Calvin
Well, the majority of tabulature submitted to OLGA is for guitar in .tab or .crd (yay for text files!) with a little .btab for you bassists. I have found some very accurate tabs on OLGA, and I do feel it is a useful resource. While reprinting copyrighted material without the author's permission is illegal, I think this falls under fair use; it is like teaching a friend to play a song on guitar written by someone else. Except in this case, the friend is many Internet users, and the song is a lot of songs. Hehe... have you seen Office Space? :^)
While the OLGA network was shut down due to threats from the Harry Fox legal agency, a new incarnation of OLGA was started that is legally acceptable to both parties; the by-ear guitar tabulature of songs it contained may be posted, but they must be without the song lyrics which are copyrighted. New songs can be found at OLGA or Harmony Central.
I mean how many of you actually listen to 70 year old "Top Ten" hits, if they existed !?!?
I sure hope that's a troll. There was once a time when people listened to music because it's beautiful, not because they can brag to their friends that they have the l33test 0-day mp3s.
somebody bent my whookey.
To write an hook to Beatnick or another music playback device? Pick your music, pick your synthesizer voice and listen to anything in the library.
Tell me about it, all of us should be so lucky that our employers would pay our great-grandchildren for work that we are doing today.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Is this really a serious post? This is a goldmine for anyone who can play a classic instrument. It will at least be one when there are more than 42(!!!) pieces listed.
IIRC printed scores are pretty expensive?
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
You mean something like this?
http://www.artchive.com/ftp_site.htm
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
Then all forms of right of inheritance would have to go down the drain. Who should then have the money/belongings? The government???
If I made a fortune as an artist or businessman, I wouldn't want my money to be made available for politicians to waste. Better then if they go to my children or grandchildren.
You aren't just jealous of people with inheritances, are you?
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
I've been waiting for something like this for a long time, ever since I tried to arrange a Mozart sonata in middle school and found I'd have to pay through the nose for the sheet music. The great works of classical music -- just like the great novels and paintings -- are part of the world's heritage, and since their original creators are long dead, there's no reason why they shouldn't be electronically available.
But this project is important for more than just personal access to music -- it might also be very useful in academic research. I'm a medieval history major, and my professors have been raving about the availability of digitized versions of medieval texts -- you can search for a word or build a concordance in no time flat, and that's brought a number of new discoveries to light that before would just have been lost amid the thousands of parchment manuscripts.
What I wonder is whether this same effect might be seen by university music departments if something like Mutopia becomes very successful. If the entire works of J.S. Bach are available in a single library in a standard format, you could probably teach a computer to search for chord patterns, etc., and develop new ways of analyzing the score that require far less effort than just reading it through (especially for someone as prolific as Bach). If your library is big enough, you could even compare the styles of various composers and identify connections and links that before would have been entirely missed.
Of course, that would require some serious work, which means serious funding. The Mutopia "how to contribute" page talks only about music, not about cash; would there be a way to turn the project into a larger effort? This is something that universities, private charitable foundations, corporations looking for feel-good gifts, or anyone who supports the local symphony might be happy to sponsor. (And who knows? Maybe NEA would be happy to join in -- it would certainly be less controversial than Mapplethorpe photos.)
While Project Gutenberg may be too general to recieve this kind of support, a specific and research-focused project might go further than we expect.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/charities.cron/
First, the greatest obstacle to a perpetual term of copyright protection is the U.S. Constitution, which clearly precludes Congress from granting unlimited protection for copyrighted works.
Pardon my Australian, but *bullshit*. This is totally enenforceable so long as Congress can make the claim 'X plus another 20 years is still less than unlimited', where X is the current period and X plus 20 is being sought - which is exactly what they have done. *Repeatedly*.
Second, the emerging international standard, to which the bill purports to adhere, and the movement of international copyright law in general are not toward perpetual protection, but to a fixed term of protection based on the death of the author.
Ah, so the very Committee - which has just agreed to change the term of protection - claims that it is actually fixed. Damn, imagine if banks could do that with fixed interest loans. "Oh, did we say five percent? I'm sorry, we meant fifteen percent. Just change that little bit of the contract we signed with you."
Third, the principle behind the U.S. copyright term--that it protect the author and at least one generation of heirs--remains unchanged by the bill. The 20-year extension proposed by the bill merely modifies the length of protection in nominal terms to reflect the scientific and demographic changes that have rendered the life-plus-50 term insufficient to meet this aim.
Ah. I see. So as scientific progress continues to improve our lifespans, copyright should be extended similarly? Yeah, I can't wait to see all the millenia-old geezers hoarding their royalty cheques. NOT!
These legal tricks are total and utter bullshit, and it's a pity that the founders of the U.S. didn't state a specific number of years when they wrote the Constitution. At least then it'd require an Amendment to pass this crud. If the committee was truly concerned about an author's kids, they'd fix the term at twice the age of legal adulthood or something (36 years, in Australia): time enough for raising a family and seeing your kids become independant adults, even if you haven't started that family yet.
Finally, if anyone thinks I'm biased - heck yes. My mum's a successful author, but I don't want to bludge off her success for the rest of my life. I want to grow up to make my own contribution to the world!
... there's lots of (classical) music in easy-to-read editions that's out of copyright. Pretty much everything published by Dover, for example - these are repros of 19th-century editions (for ex., the Bach-Gesellschaft ed. of Bach's complete works). Take a look at the copyright notices in any Dover edition - the preface (if there is one) will be copyrighted, but the music itself won't be. Incidentally, I often play from facsimiles of composer's autographs or 1st editions if I have them (Fuzeau sells some very cheaply). You have to learn some weird clefs, but they're basically legible, of course - the composers (and whomever they wrote for) could read them perfectly well. Stuart Frankel, Ph.D., musicology (that plus 50 cents will get you a VERY SMALL cup of coffee)
I don't think it requires a lot of funding to keep a website on the net indefinitely, and I think the lilypond project is as robust as most of the other gnu efforts. That being said, if I were looking for a free music publishing project to compare to gutenberg, mutopia isn't the one I would have picked. What gutenberg provides is a very bare raw text version of a piece of writing. To publish a score in lilypond requires a lot of thinking about the formatting, that's more equivalent to writing a novel in LaTeX than to producing a Gutenberg text. I think the closest equivalent to that in music publishing would be the ABC archives at http://www.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc/ Other sites that are more encyclopedic than the Mutopia one is (yet) are http://www.musicaviva.com and http://www.cpdl.org. Neither of these is as religious about being open source as mutopia or the ABC site, but I think the cpdl (Choral Public Domain library) in particular is probably the wave of the future for providing out-of-copyright music via the internet. If you publish music that's in the right genre, and you want to be linked to, it links to you and you have the freedom to provide whatever music in whatever format suits you. Another site with a lot of open source music available is http://www.gmd.de/Misc/Music/. More ideas about music publishing on the internet are discussed at http://www.mstation.org/internetpublishing.html, which features interviews with several people who are doing it.
At the risk of playing to the troll.... Since this music is all in the public domain, your assertions are akin to telling people that they can't grow their own gardens because they are taking money out of the mouths of farmers. The capital you're so concerned about is just shifted to another segment of the economy.
If the music were still under copyright you might make the argument that the copyist is denying the originator the fruits of his/her labor, but this is just inane.
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As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
Two things are clear here.
First, there have to be a lot more submissions and it has to be very clear where they came from and that they are legal. CHECK, CHECK, CHECK to make sure that is true. Then, check again. Remember if this actually starts to hurt a company's business the lawyers will swarm like sharks.
Second, once the project has matured, the word needs to be put out to schools. They will gain the most immediate benefit, and be the most worthwhile talent pool to develop. Students may eventually contribute original work to the project, so lets get the name out! Of course, the hard part is reaching people without having the project dismissed as a scam. Hmmm. I suppose some teachers union can be notified, and have them spread the word. Anyway, that's important, but for the future. Right now, lets find those unedited sheets and typeset some music!
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
denemo.sourceforge.net is the location of the most advanced GUI for Lilypond. It's good, but development seems to have stalled a little of late. Anyway, even at 0.5 or whatever, it will almost certainly help with the job of note typesetting. Complex formating will need to be done by hand. Denemo is designed with that editing model in mind - rough it out in the GUI, then go in and apply the finishing touches by hand.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Take a look at denemo.sourceforge.net. Still in earlier stages, but should take at least some of the bit out of composing.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
So, did Mr. Bono's ghost have anything to do with this one, too?
"Clearly precludes" my ass. There's no difference between "unlimited protection" and "protection that will expire five years from now, or rather now, I really mean now..."
Oh well.
Some of these artists did not record or compose in 1931 or earlier. For example, Robert Johnson recorded in 1936 and 1937. Les Paul/Mary Ford dates from the early 1950s, I believe.
Great! Now you just killed your own argument. 'To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries; Did you notice the authors and inventors thingy? It says nothing of their children. It is YOU who are allowed to profit for a limited time and pass on the dole you made to your children. If your children are creative enough then they will have a protection on their own inventions, but their parent's inventions go on to enrich the general pool of society's knowledge.
Just like banks and insurance companies were separated at the beginning of the century because they could not be trusted together, just like AT&T was split because it could not be trusted to handle both Long Distance and Local traffic, it is time to split the Content Creation from Content Distribution. A company can Create new Content, or a company can Distribute such a content, but it cannot do both nor can both types of companies be part of the same consortium. In plain English: Disney can create new movies, but Disney cannot distribute it. Same thing with the record labels. No distribution company could hold any copyright to anything but their own name.
By freeing distribution companies from the burden of copyright problems, they will concentrate on ways and means to make the content more accesible to the masses. They would earn their profit from making content available. Instead of one napster, we would see a million napster and the impulse to fiber-optic every house in order to deliver the best quality content to the house.
On the other hand, content creators will dedicate their time to make new creations to entertain a ever more sophisticated public, to make new things. There will be a stop to those hurry up jobs, quick compilations, those CDs with one hit and 11 fillers. If the work is not good, distribution cannot sell it and there would be no demand.
Right now the marriage of content creating/distributing conglomerates is what forces such low-quality, high-priced content into the public, where the sheer force of distribution on one side and copyright misuse on the other side deprives the general mass public from qualifying what is worthy and what is not. My two cents.
How many of the popular songs on Napster was made by now DEAD artists? Damn close to none, so take your lousy excuse for a reason somewhere else. Valid options include
a) I'm against IP law and won't respect it
b) I'm an anarchist
c) I just don't want to pay
d) All of the above
..and a few others, but give me a break.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Does anyone know how the effort to make a GUI for LilyPond is going? Until that effort is complete, this kind of activity is unfortunately going to be limited to (a) extreme geeks who want to hand-code LilyPond, or (b) people who don't mind shelling out lots of money for proprietary software.
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is it still relevant today ?
It would be relevant if you'd stop whining, compose some of your own music, and intentionally make it free.
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The Web democratized publishing, and gazillions of people have now published the equivalent of short articles via the internet -- they're called web pages. As for full-length books, there are (see my sig) something like 150 free-as-in-beer or free-as-in speech books that I know of (not counting old public-domain books). Commercial publishers have even started making books free-as-in-beer (example).
What about music? Mutopia is doing a great job with public-domain music (does anyone understand how tedious it is to enter a long piece of complex classical music into LilyPond notation by hand, with no GUI???), but it's amazing what a wasteland the net is for music intentionally made free by living artists. I made an ill-fated attempt to create a site for free-as-in-speech music (focusing more on recent stuff). Now I made a lot of blunders, so really I just have to count this as an learning experience in how not to build an online community. But it's still just a little shocking that there's virtually no free-as-in-speech modern music on the web. (I contributed a few of my own jazz tunes, but I don't claim they're anything earthshattering.)
This is particularly pathetic because there's so much music notation software that's either free (LilyPond) or cheap (Lime).
Maybe it's just that the musicians' culture hasn't gotten hip to free information. I guess musicians are so used to getting ripped off by record companies, etc., that they are in defense mode, and won't even consider setting their music free?
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70 year old music? /hot jazz club of france.
Easy.
Les Paul and his trio/ Les Paul and Mary Ford.
Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grapelli
Gershwin, Ira and George
Berlin, Irving
Robert Johnson
Big Bill Broonzy
Blind Lemon Jefferson
and others.
all over 70 years.
In my cd player at this moment is Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Gudonov.
Either you failed at music appreciation class or were one of the poor souls who didn't bother to take it. Your loss.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Les Paul began recording in 1932. His era of biggest hits with Mary Ford, including the Les Paul Television Show, was in the 50's. So yes, you're right...
I guess I was responding to the notion that older music (even if it's as recent as the 20th century) has no value.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
is the Choral Public Domain Library. This has been going on for years now (I was one of the early contributors), and has an impressive collection.
Respondeo dicendum quod . . .
A site which might interest those who appreciate Mutipia is the Mudcat Cafe.
The Mudcat Discussion Forum contains links to the Digital Tradition, a sort of Project Gutenberg for (mainly) public domain song lyrics. Some of the lyrics are linked to MIDI sequences, and a careful search of the forum archives can turn up many one-line melodies in ABC notation.
I prefer anarchy, but only under a strong & wise anarch
American creators anticipate that their copyrights will serve as important sources of income for their children
the composer's daughter, remains extremely active in publishing and exploiting her father's music
Excuse me? I find the logic in this quote to be severly lacking. What right, exactly, is being upheld by allowing children to milk the creative efforts of their parents for profit long after their death? Who's interests are being served here?
This just proves to me that the only point of these copyright "laws" is to return our society to some sort of medieval caste system in which everything a person may hold as their own is determined by something as vaporous as "birthright". This benefits only a select few at the expense of many, and I find it reprehensible.
We are supposed to have moved beyond this sort of situation in which the undeserving yet well-born are given a leg up on everyone else. This is not fair and it is not equality. If government refuses to pass laws to promote equality amongst all peoples, then it becomes the duty of the right-thinking to violate government whim in direct opposition to their bourgeois policies.
I will continue my long crusade against all forms of copyright by utilizing Napster, Gnutella, Freenet, and any other source of revenue-harming protest I can.
From the website:
Seventy years after a composer dies, the copyright on his work expires and anyone can copy it.
Am I the only one who thinks 70 years is a ridiculous amount of time for a dead person to hold onto a copyright? Hell, what is the purpose of musical copyright in the first place?
Music, like digital information, is nothing more than a specific arrangement of a finite number of symbols. The entire concept that someone can "own" a particular grouping of symbols is at best ludicrous.
This sounds like a great idea, but I believe the Gutenberg project is committed effort run by monks. I'm by no means knocking the effort of the volunteers, but wonder if this is just a short-lived idea, or of there is significant enough funding/interest to keep this online indefinitely.
I mean, monks are known for keeping ritual alive for centuries/millenia... can an open-source/decentralized set of contributors do the same?
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https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Hmmm, the title got me excited at first. My mouth was already watering with the idea of a new source for music. Hey this score is 70 years old !! Sure great for remixing new songs, but is it still relevant today ?
I mean how many of you actually listen to 70 year old "Top Ten" hits, if they existed !?!?
Dodge this !! --Trinity, The Matrix
This site is great, but there really isn't a lot of music on there. And besides, their FTP server is down :( I don't think lilypond is a good format though, it's too complicated to write. I guess this is one of the great things about /. , We find new sites, and make them big! :)
Or at least when they die.
I'm a drummer for a local band to Minneapolis called Hed Kase. You can catch us next at 44th & Upton February 3rd in Minneapolis... cover charge is $5. Satisfied? My point is that something that EVERYONE uses (most everybody sings Happy Birthday at home, at work, we sing it at school) should not be so privatized.
I think this is why in movies at birthday parties the kids always sing "For he's a jolly good fellow" instead of "Happy Birthday". I always wondered why they sang that, because REAL kids don't sing that. Like 2 weeks ago I learned "Happy Birthday" was still copyrighted and "For He's a Jolly Fellow" was not so they save money by using the free one. There are 2 old ladies in Cleveland who wrote it and they get royalties or something like that. These copyright laws really need to be reviewed... maybe 5 to 25 years or something... Or maybe they become public domain when the guy stops making music or something.
The problem is that storing that much video isn't cheap. Perhaps some kind soul could donate money to make such an effort possible.
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
I'm learning to play piano (although with an electronic keyboard) but I want to learn classical music, not modern stuff. I've found a couple of sites that have downloadable scores, but not much. This site will be invaluable.
On the downside, why is everything an FTP link? I'd really like to click on a MIDI or PNG link and have it just play/show--as it is I have to download the MIDI or score and view it "manually".
Also, can anyone answer me this: I download lilypond a few weeks ago (along with a million other required packages). Finally got it all installed and lilypond just crashes. Boom, it dies. Is there a mailing list or FAQ or something?
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MailOne
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
The logical extension of this is paintings, drawings and such
Has anyone started that project yet ?.. Do painting's "copyright" ever expire ?
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Jon - TheSpork
Gah. I found no other posts stating this opinion, unless you were looking down. Unfairly moderated
:(
Seeka
Sadly, to many people involved in this discussion, 'Music' seems to be electrical impulses fed through transducers. A totally passive process.
Musicians call this 'the reproduction of recorded music' and it's not what Mutopia is really about.
Making music involves sitting down at the piano, or resting the guitar across your lap and strumming it, or even just singing or whistling a tune in your head.
It's not a 'couch potato' activity at all.
Hay thar.
Olga was like this. . .
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Consider the daffodil. And while you're doing that, I'll be over here, looking through your stuff.
One of the standard outputs from any version of lilypond is a midi file. It can not yet go the other way and pull in a midi to produce the typeset output. There is a large discussion re this on their mailing list archive. Of course if you are meaning an OCR tool to read non-lilypond 'traditional' sheet music this won't help! Have you tried joining their mailing list / discussion group to see if anyone out there has any ideas about how to OCR into lilypond?
"Linux users never complain about Microsoft. They don't need to!"
Not sure if they're gonna port it to Linux, though. Or even Windows.
I didn't pay for my operating system either
Courtney Love also has not been quiet about artists getting shafted ... indeed, there was a transcription of a speech she gave to a crowd of several tens of thousands of fans about exactly this [sorry, no link].
As for Kurt Cobain, a friend of mine saw her a few days after he died. She was pretty upset about it.
Whatever you have against Courtney Love, she deserves more credit than that.
I didn't pay for my operating system either
Could be wrong, though.
I didn't pay for my operating system either
The license they distribute their music under (MutopiaBSD) sounds quite fair, and it sounds like a good deal of it is public domain anyway. I hope this succeeds. It'd be a great example of a free collection of human culture and creativity. Perhaps Project Gutenberg will eventually head down the same path that Mutopia is. PG's massive text prepended to every work and the very primitive formatting of the text makes it difficult to live with at times. (Don't get me wrong; it's still a great resource!)
Steven N. Severinghaus
consider www.olga.net
im a composer and when i do my notation i use sibelius and with it comes a program called scorch, it displays the score on your screen and u press play and it plays the tune while it follows the notes, its pretty cool, but this format they use is not my fav thing, i mean trying to enter a wagner score or lizst would prolly take forever to do,but it does have promise, just the format should be changed unless entering the public domain in sibelius is against the law, whhich is prolly not true...jsut htey better use somthing other what they have or the collection wont grow fast enough or have small pieces and nothing huge like a berloz symphony or mahler(symphony 6 plz?) "wity quote"
Yes, it is possible to output as MIDI, but this doesn't preserve any of the formatting and importing MIDI into Lilypond (and tidying up the resulting .ly files) is a time consuming business.