Potential LSR licensing violations

[Jean Abou Samra]

Hi,

I figured that now I am an LSR editor, I had to learn about what
legal responsibility I have when accepting contributions.

The LSR is advertised as being released under the public domain.
This is supposed to work in conjunction with LilyPond contributors
making modifications in snippets/new/ thanks to this bit of text
in LICENSE.DOCUMENTATION:

"""
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify the
documentation for GNU LilyPond under the terms of the GNU Free
Documentation License as published by the Free Software Foundation,
either version 1.3, or (at your option) any later version; with no
Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts and no Back-Cover Texts.

A copy of the license is contained in the file COPYING.FDL.

The following exceptions apply:

  * It does not apply to input files (contained in the
    directory tree Documentation/snippets/); these are in
    the public domain.
  [...]
"""

So far, so good. However, take this snippet:

https://lsr.di.unimi.it/LSR/Item?id=102

It begins with 300 lines of code that used to be in the LilyPond
repository, released under the GPL, before they were considered
legacy and moved to a snippet. I am pretty sure this violates
the GPL. 300 lines looks too much for fair use law to apply,
doesn't it?

Something similar although less extreme is done in this snippet:

https://lsr.di.unimi.it/LSR/Snippet?id=763

What should we do about these snippets? Delete them? Introduce
an exception "snippets are in the public domain unless stated
otherwise" and add headers to them stating they are under
the GPL?

Thanks,
Jean