March 8, 2006, 8:04 p.m. (Message 44586, in reply to message 44574)
Alexandre Rafalovitch wrote: > P.s. Is it even legal to generate Pilling's diagrams? I thought he > copyrighted the whole thing. In their dreams! You can't copyright a notation any more than you can copyright a language or mathematical formula, as these come under the heading of »ideas«, which are not copyrightable. What you can (probably) copyright is individual diagrams of particular dances, which are considered »expression«. I remember hearing that F. L. Pilling's successors (the body now in charge of the WGB) complained to Dunedin Dancers of Edinburgh about their including Pilling-style diagrams in their dance books »without permission«. They only shut up after being pointedly asked whether *they* had bothered to ask permission from the authors of all the dances in the Pilling book. In any case, Pilling-style diagrams are the norm for pre-published ball programmes here in Germany (for better or worse). Don't ask where all the diagrams come from; there are newly-drawn ones but people also pinch ones from the book. However, I'm about to order at least five new copies of the book on behalf of members of my dance group, expressly because they want to get more familiar with the notation so as to understand these programmes better. Thus, going after people pinching a few diagrams from the Pilling book would probably be the single worst thing the Pilling people could do as far as sales of their book in Germany are concerned. (Incidentally, text-based minicribs are making some inroads here because they are so much easier to generate than Pilling-style programmes. I hate them :^)) Anselm -- Anselm Lingnau, Frankfurt, Germany ..................... xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.xxx Most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics. -- Paul Graham, »What You Can't Say«