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Complete Mozart Works Now Free
An anonymous reader writes "Mozart's year-long 250th birthday party is ending on a high note with the musical scores of his complete works available for the first time free on the Internet. Although most classical music is obviously too old to be under copyright, the rights to specific editions of pieces are owned by the publishers. Now, the International Mozart Foundation has acquired the right to publish the prestigious New Mozart Edition of every Mozart work on the internet. The response has been so overwhelming that the Foundation has been forced to increase their server capacity."
wget -r -l 0 -np -Ajpg http://dme.mozarteum.at/; gocr *.jpg | txt2midi | mid2mp3 | mpg123 Aw yea
But seriously, the proper phrase is that you want someone else's information to be free. Information doesn't want anything.
Look, if some dude feeds 5000 people with 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish, it's a miracle. If Linus Thorvalds provides Linux for all of mankind from a single master copy, big whoop. Fundamentally if I eat a fish, the fish is consumed. If I watch a movie, it is not.
In classic economics you have the term "natural price", which means the zero-profit price ignoring R&D. For the abstract concept information. ignoring media costs - for example the difference between a blank and recorded CD - the natural cost is zero. That is the market price with perfect competition, everything else is caused by imperfections or government regulations in the market. In that sense, it's perfectly reasonable to say that information "wants to" be free.
Of course a whole other story is that there'd be no commercial market, because you have a non-zero investment and zero profits. That is why even the founding fathers, who hardly were mouthpieces for copyright holders recognized copyright to "promote the science and arts". In addition, there's many other factors which means this isn't a perfect market. However, that only changes the market price, not the natural price. The more of these you remove, the more it will approach its natural price, whether you anthropomorphize it or not.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This is really a shame too. MIDI offers the potential to micromanage every instrument if you like, but so often sample libraries don't have the necessary nuance (or worse, you might not have space in your sampler for everything you want) Instruments with a fast attack can be worked around pretty well by bringing up the volume from something very low, but there's not much you can do with stuff like "slow strings". That's the sort of patch that's pretty much guaranteed never to sound good in a classical setting.
I've noticed that some of the best synth programming appears in the music from the tracker scene. There's a bunch of people who have a very good handle on what their software can do, and they often push it to the max. Ditto for some of the music targeted at the OPL chips in older Sound Blasters.