Re: Excellent paper on 'Copyfraud'

[james]

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. 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. 
And since different editors may have added different editorial marks, there can 
be two different editions that are both out of copyright but have different 
editorial annotations. So the new edition may have used one or several previous 
editions in creating the editorial annotations for their current edition.