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From: Steve & Anne Price
Date: Sun, 8 Sep 1996 03:21:59 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: re: copyright

I agree with Will & Mike and others that one should credit sources
in writing. Like will, I teach college freshmen that academic writing
requires compulsive and compulsory citing of sources, tracking them down,
documenting them, etc. It's easy to say one should do that; it is harder
to do it in practice, rare outside of academic writing (although certain
kinds of journalism make a pretense of it, and some actually do it), and
as important as it obviously is to those of us who have posted on it, it
isn't generally regarded by our mainstream culture to be very important.
The reader I was forced to use last spring, for example, published by one
of the better textbook companies, included dozens of essays nearly all of
which were presenting information whose source wasn't cited--while I was
trying to stress the importance of tracing and citing sources to my
students.

Without getting into the misunderstandings between Jon and John
(grace Hugh), I think Jon's original question is interesting insofar as
Jon writes how-to books, not historical, economic, or even theoretical
scholarship on the harmonica. So for example one doesn't expect to see
the Joy of Cooking to cite the source for mayonaise, but they'd better
include directions for how to make it. Ditto a general guide on auto
maintenance. Certain kinds of writing (some journalism, academic
writing) demands care with sources above and beyond what the rest of the
world demands or expects or provides. It's always disorienting to me
because my writing background is academic, and I'm preponderantly
obsessed with it.

I know everyone who has posted on this have all come down on the
side of citing sources. I do to. But whom do we cite as the source, for
example, about bending notes? Again, I'm not trying to referee between
Jon and John, only trying to show that it ain't so easy. We all know
that Richter figured out how to tune diatonic harps, but forgive me, I've
seen that stated numerous times and in numerous places, but I haven't
seen the documentation, or any reference to where and how it has been
documented. That one I could probably track down with some time, but how
often have we seen it properly represented? Or the sources of the
currently now agreed upon circle of fifths as the basis for defining
"positions"? Who besides Mike knows who originated the idea of putting
windsavers on diatonic harps? Why doesn't he credit that person?

For one thing, we think of harp-l as a conversation and we don't
usually cite sources in an ordinary conversation. But as Hugh points
out, there are copyrights involved with Harp-l, so why not think of this
as a form of publishing (as the courts are beginning to, so that Congress
doesn't try to control the content of what is said here). And since
we're publishing, shouldn't we always cite sources? The answer is that
it's not always necessary to what we are doing, to what our intended
purposes are. I'll repeat that I'm not trying to comment on Jon and
John's situation, nor am I denying that Winslow got ripped off in the
ways he described. All I'm trying to do is point out the difficulties of
doing what we all agreed was the best principle, namely to cite one's
sources.

Steve Price