New candidates for inclusion in Extras : udftools and starfighter-music

[Michael Schwendt]

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 13:18:53 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:

> As far as pieces of music are concerned, I would not distribute any of
> them unless their ownership is 100% bullet proof. In best case, not
> before having received a written permission to ship them.

Even written permission is void in case the music covers another piece of
music by a different composer.  Don't be surprised if you got written
permission for redistribution and later find out he unintentionally and
subconsciously covered (and hence copied) a piece of music on the CD he
had listened to three months ago. Even if nobody complains, what to do?

In the case of these MOD files, it's very unlikely that you will be able
to track down their creators (four or five) as they didn't enter a lot of
contact information into the instrument headers as much as other musicians
did. The use of pseudonyms and "demo scene" group names, the appearance of
terms like "BBS" and "music disk", are enough reason to believe that the
files appeared in the public domain. Many hobby musicians from that area
are more than happy to see their music being spread widely and reused in
other free productions. It has happened occasionally that great demo music
was used in a commercial game without prior consent by the musician, and
he received no compensation, maybe was not even mentioned in the game's
credits. Musicians know that can happen, when they don't try to protect
their rights from the start.

Production and distribution of music is not Fedora Extras' area of
activity. It's not as if we try to enter the Top 50 charts with these
musics (like it was done with "Zombie Nation - Kernkraft 400" in 1999 with
a melody ripped off from an ancient Commodore 64 game without prior
consent).

Comments on other forms of art, e.g. pictures, fonts or other graphics in
games, anyone? ;o)

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