Does the website need philsoophy essays?

[Xavi Drudis Ferran]

El Sun, Sep 09, 2001 at 03:10:40PM +0100, Alistair Davidson deia:
> This is an email I just sent to my father, in an attempt to get him to 
> license his music (he's in a Scottish folk band called "Tarneybackle") 
> under the Open Audio License of the EFF. For those who don't know it, 
> it's like the GPL but for music. The reference to a website at the end 
> is because I'm making the band's website and want to license it under 
> the GFDL- my father had no objections to that. I've snipped the 
> beginning of the email, because it's about other things.
> 

That's really curious. I'd thought the closest precedent of free 
software in history was folklore, that is, culture collectively built 
by people and passed on, adapted and evolved by anyone around the fire. 
Where may I have read that idea?. 

Maybe modern folk music is not like that, it is more like pop, rock 
or anything nowadays , built by a single author or group and 
broadcast/reproduced in many verbatim copies. 

I don't know about your father or Tarneybackle, but I've heard people
complain about, and long for, those times before radio or television, 
were the family and/or friend would gather after supper and tell a 
story, sing a song or play music, using cultural works that weren't 
copyrighted and weren't even always properly attributed to their 
authors, but were alive. I've heard people complain that those cultural 
works might miss the excellence of the best authors or the technical 
means and training (and that isn't necessarily true), but that people
that were interpreters and coauthors would certainly get more value 
from that than from mere consumption of the latest hit. Those complaining
usually blame the TV and information and communication technologies
for turning people into streamming sinks, but they don't see that internet 
has changed that back again and brought back culture to the masses 
by letting them distribute their own works of art in addtion to 
only receveing them. Possibly free software has been the first massive
form of modern folklore because the first internet users have been 
skilled in software. It's only been 6 years or so since internet 
became mainstream, but if it isn't killed by the powers that be, 
we can still see that folklore is once again a popular activity instead
of a genre striving in the arts industry. 

So why should "GPLd" folk music be anything other than the default option?.


-- 
Xavi Drudis Ferran
xdrudis at tinet.org