On Wednesday 29 October 2003 04:42, Frank Barknecht wrote: > I mean, programmers like Paul Davis put months and years of > work into free software, too, without holding back the right > to commercial use. Commercial use only has to follow "the > rules" like: no copy-protection, no rights' stealing, etc. And > Paul surely wants to eat, too. Why should artists get to keep > more rights for themselves than the programmers? It's not so much "more rights" as "different rights". In the software arena you have source code you can hold back or give out, and the GPL requires that you give it out. This is because there are two ways to "use" software.... you can run it (the typical definition of "use") or you can incorporate some of its code into your own program. While this certainly happens in music, whether by sampling in the case of electronic forms or by quoting melodies and chord progressions in more traditional forms, there's not quite the same synergy to this kind of "source code sharing" as there is in programming. I haven't seen a free music license yet that requires you to make your original unprocessed multitrack recordings and/or sheet music available if you use music under the license in your own project, for example. So we look at the effects of the GPL and try to come up with something analogous for music. The GPL is basically written so that the code can spread far and wide without being co-opted and ultimately controlled by some big corporation with an agenda. In the music biz, that big corporation is analagous to the RIAA-associated record companies, or perhaps the people that use music in commercials, movie soundtracks, etc. I think the definition varies for each artist. The best I've been able to come up with for my own experiments so far is "verbatim electronic distribution via the internet permitted, all other rights reserved, contact me if you're interested". Maybe there's some existing free music license that's this way (kind of like the dual GPL/commercial license used by Qt and some other projects.) But even more than programmers, musicians have different goals with their music. I don't think you'll ever see one particular free music license become ascendant for that reason, and I don't know what a good catch-all license would entail. But I understand the intent of the "no commercial use" licenses. They wouldn't qualify as FSF-approved free software licenses, but then, they're not covering software. Rob
