Dear Bryan, Valmai, David and Will

please may I apologise for openly publishing your work on my new website, tjunbuk.com. I have been using your work as 'sample data' for my website whilst I have been developing it. I had not intended to publish the tunes live on the internet, though I think I probably should have sought your permission first before using them in any way. I hope you believe me that is not my intention to ever steal another person's hard work. I can only say that this was an accident, but it was certainly an avoidable one that I should not have allowed to happen. I would appreciate if you would allow me to explain how this came about, including my intentions of this site.

My name is Pat Turner, and I am a beginning musician. I decided to learn the English Concertina about a year ago, and I have made some progress largely due to people such as yourselves publishing your tunebooks on the internet. However, I have also found it very frustrating trying to find out what each of the tunes you have transcribed/written actually sounds like. I have benefitted very much from sites such as concertina.net with their tune-a-tron which allows me to generate a midi version of the tune, but I thought there must be a way of making a simpler user interface.

I am also a web developer and I saw this as an opportunity to create a website that would provide improved access to the thousands of folk tunes that are in existence. The main improvement I wanted as a beginner was to be able to browse tunes and to hear them easily without having to go through the trouble of another site's converter. I also wanted to be able to collect songs I liked into 'tunebooks' so that I could organise my attempts at learning them. As I thought more about it, I thought of more and more 'features' that could be added to such a site. Then a while ago, I had an opportunity to devote my full working days to making this happen. I have taken this opportunity and have spent about a month putting this site together. As I hope you will appreciate, I am still very much a beginner and I used your abc sources as the basis for developing the site. Using these I could pretend to be a user of the site, and check that someone could add tunes that they have written to the database.

When I do properly open the site, I intend for only genuine authors/transcribers to upload their own tunes. I did have full intentions to email yourselves and many of the other people who publish their abc music with invitations to use the service. But you would have to had put it on the site yourselves, or to have given me express permission to do so. I very much regret that I may have sullied any such positive relationship that we may have had.

I have read the mudcat thread and I'd like to deal with some issues raised there:
Public domain material: My intention for the site is that users can search for 'public domain' tunes. I.e. tunes that are no longer in copyright - mostly folk tunes. I had intended for users to search for a tune, and be able to hear and see many different 'variations' that had been provided from different transcribers. I've noticed in thesession.com, that when someone uploads a tune, someone quite often presents a variation in the comments. I wanted to allow users to have a simple way of listening to the difference. So the 'tune' should regarded as be public domain, but the transcription is a different matter. More on that next...

BTW 'Wolfhound_person' is correct in that I haven't done my homework as I didn't know that 'Caddam Woods' was still in copyright.

Copyright and licensing: I think that whoever transcribes an out of copyright tune has copyright over that transcription and I want my site to take that into account. My approach to copyright protection was going to be threefold:
1. Provide a highly visible way of reporting copyright infringement, with possible sanctions against users who add tunes that are not theirs.
2. Provide a facility to attach a licence agreement to each tune's usage. I haven't done much work on this yet (its suddenly jumped to top of the list), but I was looking at the creative commons licence. If users wanted a different licence agreement, they would provide a link to it.
3. Provide a way for users who add transcriptions to link back to the original source. I was wondering about having some very fancy system that checked for changes in the original source, but this might be pretty tricky to implement.

Google Ads: Well I have to hold my hands up here. I am developing this website as a commercial venture. I have absolutely no idea what sort of income you can generate through Google Ads, but I'm not holding my breath on becoming a millionnaire. I have also integrated with Amazon.com so that users can download mp3s or buy CDs of commercial recordings. These revenue streams are more of a way to fund the site itself though. I have considered going to the arts council or similar to get public funding, but at the moment its just me, so any help through ads or amazon purchases will help in some way. Also, please note that the site isn't supposed to be live yet: I don't know if it ever will be if I upset my potential users any more, but at the moment I'm not expecting to generate any money through the ads.

Printing tunes and CDs: This idea might not happen as I can't find a cost effective publisher. My intention was for people to get professionally bound prints of their tunebooks. I also wanted for users to upload mp3s so they can be used on CDs. I had thought about having some sort of royalty system, but I don't know if that would be workable, or desirable. Anyhow, the publishing feature is probably not going to happen.

I'm very sorry that you found my site in this way - I have no idea how you did, as I can't seem to get one hit on google! I had intended to invite you all as beta testers, once the site was in a fit state. I hope you would still consider this in the future, but I fully understand if you don't.

Finally, I won't be using your abc sources again, even in development, unless you do give me permission. I will transcribe some tunes myself, and hope that when the time comes to open up the site, some of you do decide to use it.

Thanks for your time in reading this.
Pat Turner