Re: Excellent paper on 'Copyfraud'

[Tim McNamara]

On Mar 8, 2013, at 11:33 AM, 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.

Copyright varies by country rather than being internationally uniform, 
something of a problem now that the Internet has obliterated national 
boundaries for the sharing of information, copyrighted or otherwise.  In the 
US, at least, the novel arrangement of public domain works can be copyrighted.  
I can't copyright a Brahms piece, but I can copyright my arrangement of it.  I 
am not sure what constitutes an arrangement in the legal sense.