Re: Thinking about putting together a grant to support development on LilyPond

[David Kastrup]

Janek Warchoł <address@hidden> writes:

> 2012/2/10 Nick Payne <address@hidden>:
>> On 10/02/12 10:00, Janek Warchoł wrote:
>>> Heck, let's do it!
>>> Do you know of any famous pieces of music without freely accessible
>>> scores? [...]
>>
>> The minimum required by the Berne convention is 50 years beyond the authors
>> death before a work becomes public domain.
>
> Ok, here are some ideas:
> - Sergei Rachmaninoff died in March 1943.  If we start a year-long
> project now, we will finish roughly when most of his works will fall
> out of copyright.

How would one cooperate while they are not yet out of copyright?  Want
to risk having your servers seized?  It is in the best interest of
Sergei Rachmaninoff if anybody doing things like that ends up in jail,
since he was able to provide a living for his grandchildren only by
selling rights to publishing companies that paid as much since they were
planning to make the most of it, with him living or dead.

I expect that in a few years, composers becoming famous in their life
time will get life support systems paid by their publishers, preferably
after they are brain dead but in a defensible way not legally dead, in
order to be able to extend copyrights.

Every publishing company will entertain a zombie house where some parts
of composers/writers are kept legally alive for the sake of copyright
extensions.

> - Maurice Ravel died in 1937
> - Gabriel Faure died in 1924
> - Camille Saint-Saens died in 1921
> - Claude Debussy died in 1918
>
> Thoughts?
> I'm pretty sure that there might be appropriate works of older
> composers, just like Bach's Goldberg Variations, but i'm not
> knowledgeable in this area.

There is certainly quite a matter of material that would be worth
publishing at a level better reviewed and controlled than "somebody
typed it off once".

-- 
David Kastrup