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Re: Excellent paper on 'Copyfraud'


From: Urs Liska
Subject: Re: Excellent paper on 'Copyfraud'
Date: Sat, 09 Mar 2013 14:56:18 +0100
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Am 09.03.2013 12:50, schrieb 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.
I think such editorial work _is_ as much scholarly work as one that is expressed in words and sentences. It is _not_ creative in the sense of artistic creation and as the original musical work that is edited. But scientific intellectual achievement is as much copyrightable as artistic achievements.

Therefore in Germany (I don't know where else this applies) you can 'register' a scholarly edition of a work otherwise out of copyright. If this claim gets approved (it will be checked whether the edition adheres to scholarly standards and is substantially different from existing editions) you will hold the performing rights and copyright for this edition for 25 years.
Of course this doesn't give you any copyright on the original composition.

Urs



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