Re: Excellent paper on 'Copyfraud'

[David Kastrup]

james <address@hidden> writes:

> On Mar 8, 2013, at 6:33 PM, Tim Slattery wrote:
>
>> Mike Blackstock <address@hidden> wrote:
>> 
>>> This paper might be of interest to anyone typesetting public domain
>>> music from so-called copyrighted scores:
>>> http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=787244
>> 
>> Excellent article, even if it is 7 years old.
>> 
>> I'm in a singing group. We sing madrigals and some baroque pieces, all
>> several hundred years old. I see books all the time with copyright
>> notices all over the place on songs that were written 300 to 500 years
>> ago. I wonder just what is under copyright? Words and music certainly
>> are not. Any foreword, biographical material, commentary certainly is.
>> 
>> If the editor went to an old source, transcribed the piece into more
>> modern notation, added measures, key signature, time signature, does
>> that make the product copyrightable? If I make a copy with Lilypond,
>> is that infringement? Since I've produced sheet music for a public
>> domain work, I don't think so.
>
> It's exactly these things: articulations, editorial annotations,
> expressive marks, that are under frequently copyright.

Also the actual image.  It's probably safest to start from an "Urtext".
Now those go to a lot of pain to create a canonical version from
possibly conflicting manuscripts, and that is a lot of work, too.  But
it's not creative expression and thus should not be copyrightable
content.  Naturally I am not a lawyer, and you should remember that with
a host of lawyers at the disposal of publishing houses, being in the
right is only able to moderately tilt the balance of a court case
outcome anyway, and even winning it may lead to your bankruptcy.

> Unfortunately, you have to find a version that predates the
> copyrighted version you're looking at in order to know exactly what
> the new edition added and what was in the source material.

I had some reasonably renowned edition (I am not mentioning its name
right now since I don't reliably remember) from Bach Toccata and Fugue
in D minor (yes, the infamous one), and the small print said that any
performance differing from the reading in the score was prohibited.
Also that any performance needed to attribute the edition.

After the legal department of the publisher did not reply to my
questions, I sent that edition back and got one from a different
publisher.

If more people refused to say "I agree" to completely outrageous
conditions, maybe the legal departments of publishers would start
reining their drug usage in somewhat.

-- 
David Kastrup