Tuba Excerpts Site

[davewerden]

There is a new site online now with a lot of standard tuba excerpts, both as HTML files and also as a downloadable PDF. Check it out!

(Link withdrawn by poster - see below)

[ghmerrill]

I think that this is a great resource and will be much appreciated by the tuba-playing community. However, IN MY OPINION it violates the fair use doctrine of US copyright law, and I'm pretty sure a court would agree if it's ever challenged.

I fear that the site page on Copyright Law is disingenuous and conflates the exclusions of copying for teaching purposes, scholarship, or research with the purpose of this site: which is NOT teaching, scholarship or research, but rather is clearly to present this "resource" to the international community of tuba players for their use in practicing and developing their skills. In the eyes of the law, the lack of a profit motive is not sufficient to allow what is clearly the publication of these excerpts to the public (any more than their collected publication in paper form would be permissible). Again, I'm quite confident that a court would NOT find that this publication falls under the description of "nonprofit educational purposes". The solicitation of contributions to defray "operational" expenses -- even in the absence of a profit motive -- is also, I think, an unwise request.

The website may have been "created as a scholarly project" and "to provide an educational resource" in the mind of the creator, but it most definitely is NOT a scholarly project (I can expand on this, but it should be clear to anyone who understands what a scholarly project is), and while it may provide an "educational resource", copyright law does not exclude the provision of educational resources from its prohibitions. Again, just consider how the publication -- for profit or not -- of a collection of portions of copyrighted works, devoid of criticism or analysis and "scholarly references" to related literature, etc. would be viewed. I believe it would be perfectly within the exclusions of copyright law if someone were to collect this material and use it in the teaching of his/her students in a course (though even doing this on a continuing basis with the same collection of material is questionable). But "For ease of use, please feel free to find a download of all the available excerpts in a PDF document ... for practicing purposes"? No. This clearly and obviously places what's going on outside the "scholarly", "research", or "teaching" domains. It's publication (or "re-publication" if you like) of copyrighted works.

Finally, it seems odd that the creator of the site has not identified himself/herself anywhere that I can see. Oddly, he/she HAS identified a faculty member at ECU who is claimed to have provided "support". I have to wonder how much Prof. McCaslin has thought about this and how he feels about being identified on the site.

Just my two cents. Over the years (and given my experience in both industry and academia) I've become very sensitive to issues involving intellectual property and copyright. This indeed WOULD be a great resource -- if it were clearly legal. The proper approach would be to get permission from the copyright holders (for use in a non-profit publication) and then proceed on that basis. Simply taking parts of their copyrighted publications and aggregating them into a publication which you then encourage people to download and use would, I think, be viewed very dimly by the courts.

[davewerden]

Gary,

Thanks for your thoughtful, and I believe correct, perspective. Because I try to be sensitive to copyright I pulled the link out of the post. I probably should have realized the potential infringement myself, buy my brain has not caught up yet from being at ITEC.

(I'm leaving the thread up for now just as a reminder to us all about being careful to respect copyright.)

[ghmerrill]

As I say, it is (or would be) a wonderful resource. As a scholarly work (e.g., Master's thesis -- which I assume wasn't just an aggregation of the excerpts, but included some significant analysis, comparison, perhaps recommended uses in instruction, etc.) there's no question of its falling under fair use. Many people -- especially in the academic community -- have quite a liberal understanding of fair use (until it comes to someone "fair using" things they've done themselves ). With the proper care and effort this could be made into something that would be not only a contribution to the tuba-playing community, but a well-deserved source of revenue for the author.

If I were the author, that's what I'd do: start the (lengthy and painful) process of contacting the publishers for permission. This is much easier nowadays than it was, say 30 years ago. Of course, some of them are bound to be rigid and stubborn. But it would be worth the effort to at least put the time in and try it. It would take some time (I'd be prepared to give it a couple of years of effort before I decided either to continue with it or give it up). But if you got a reasonable number of pieces, then going the self-publishing route is very easy now.

I'm trying to be encouraging here, since I think it would be a great thing -- done in the right way.