[Foundation-l] Implications of IMSLP case

[Stephen Bain]

On 10/22/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> In addition to that mess the layout/typography of sheet much enjoys
> copyright in some jurisdictions... although these can be avoided by
> retranscribing the works... but for many kinds of music that can be a
> really substantial amount of work. (Too bad we don't have the WikiTeX
> sheet music extension...)

A purely electronic representation would be good since in many
jurisdictions electronic representations, unlike physical
representations, don't attract separate copyrights on the layout.

I note that on the IMSLP forums the suggestion has been raised by one
of the site admins that since the project was getting too large for
one person to handle anyway, another project like Gutenberg or
Wikimedia might be able to take it over.

There have already been some efforts towards having more sheet music
within Wikimedia projects, including a proposal for a separate sheet
music project (though perhaps a different name would be appropriate):

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiScores

See also:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Music_markup

The music part of WikiTeX seems pretty good, it even generates midis
along with the sheet music image!

http://wikisophia.org/wiki/Wikitex#Music

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com