[NTLK] Newton song

[NewtonTalk]

> Frank, do you really think amateurs fiddling with a tune on this email
list would grab an attorney blood hound?s attention?

No, I don't. But what I think doesn't matter. Fact is that it CAN happen.
And if it DOES happen, I don't want to be the copyright lawyers' victim.

I'm an electronics engineer. People like me have learned that assuming
things, or taking guesses, is never a good strategy when you intend to
create something. People like me only work with stuff they know down to the
last nanosecond. And even though they do, they'll still get the latest data
book and double-check. Just in case. As to copyright...

That's one of those things I wouldn't even be able to grasp if there was but
the German version. My brain simply isn't made for things like copyright or
tax law. To make things worse, there probably aren't two countries on this
planet whose copyright regulations are exactly identical. This is why the
one and only copyright decision I'll ever make is that I won't take any
chances.

That being said: It wouldn't be but amateurs fiddling with a tune. If the
song was good enough to make it into Noah's second film, it could, and
probably would, be eventually regarded as a pirated song that was publicly
shown. A song in a film that's being actively sold or rented. 

> My sense is Newton is pretty much off humanity?s radar.

That's certainly correct. But a copyright infringement remains a copyright
infringement, regardless of the context in which it appears. There are many
people out there who feed their families with uncovering those.

> Long as there?s no promoting and no selling, I suspect we don?t need to
worry about legal sharks.

That might be the case in the US, but it's certainly not so in Germany. If I
grabbed my guitar, went to the park and played my own composition to an
audience of five people, I would be infringing on copyright issues even if
but two bars of my five minute song sounded like something easily
recognizable from e. g. our German electro-pop pioneers Kraftwerk. These
fellows have recently won a long-running copyright battle over a two-second
clip of their 1977 track Metal On Metal...

The only way to do this reasonably risk-free would be by writing an entirely
new song. So why not write your own melody, or your own lyrics, and send it
in! It's not that difficult. If you listen closely to the soundtracks of
"Love Notes to Newton", you'll come across a short snippet that I wrote and
recorded in about 15 minutes. And if there's one thing I'm NOT, it's an
artist. I'm sure there are lots of people on this list who are way more
talented than I am. So why not get started! Compose a melody! Write some
lyrics! Just make sure it's not based on anything that already exists. It
doesn't matter which of the two appears first. We can always take things up
from there.

Cheers

Frank

-- Newton software and hardware at http://www.pda-soft.de