12 Apr
2010
12 Apr
'10
6:46 a.m.
On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 12:20 PM, Jeff Kaufman
<jeff(a)alum.swarthmore.edu> wrote:
> One source that gives a sense of what's out there is Michael Dyck's
> Contradance Index. [1] It has publication info, dance title,
> authorship, and formation for every dance I've ever tried to look up.
> [1] http://www.ibiblio.org/contradance/index/
This raises a question about the contents of an
on-line database of
contra dance sequences: should it contain sequences AS PUBLISHED, or
also include variations of those dances? Who would own the copyright
of a derived dance, and be in a position to authorize viewing of the
sequence, if the original author does not allow it?
Of course, the other interesting aspect of copyright
is simultaneous
invention of a sequence by different people.
Copyright hardly enters into it. (I do think that _courtesy_ does, and you
shouldn't publish other people's dances without their permissions - but it
appears to be the case that you can't actually copyright choreography. You
may have copyright in the precise text of a dance description as you write it
down (eg, the moment the creative work becomes fixed in tangible form), but the
mere fact that you put known sequences into a particular order doesn't legally
grant you the right to prevent somebody else from describing those sequences in
that order.)
Besides the technical matter of writing the software,
policy and
social issues seem pretty significant.
Yes.
-- Alan
--
===============================================================================
Alan Winston --- WINSTON(a)SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU
Disclaimer: I speak only for myself, not SLAC or SSRL Phone: 650/926-3056
Paper mail to: SSRL -- SLAC BIN 99, 2575 Sand Hill Rd, Menlo Park CA 94025
===============================================================================