Copyright stifles creativity by making it blinkin’ impossible to know when you’re infringing 20 September, 2008
Posted by fraggle in Jukebox Jury, The Age of Spin, Travelogue.trackback
Last night (well, tonight – I haven’t got to bed yet!) was the first rehearsal for this year’s Christmas Concert for our Stake Choir. While there I heard about an extremely bizarre anecdote. Last year, we performed ‘O Holy Night’. The version we have music for only as the first 2 verses for some reason. During rehearsals the director decided that after the second chorus, we’d repeat the first to finish. So that’s what we did in the concerts. After one of them, a former director of the choir (incidentally the previous Stake President) was approached by a gentleman who asked who had given us permission to change the song. The man (who is supposedly in the music business) then claimed that by repeating the chorus we had rearranged the piece and thus infringed copyright. The sum result of this conversation is that the choir director now refuses to do the same this year in order to not cause trouble.
All of which I find quite incredible. My question is: whose copyright is being infringed and how?It can’t be the composer’s, who died over 100 years ago. I don’t know who did the arrangement, as I don’t believe the sheet music says, but I’ll check that when I see it again. The sheet music itself is copyright 1901, but claimed by a company, not a person, which raises another question: How long does such a copyright last? It’s not like you can use the author’s life+70 year formula as companies neither live nor die.
What I really don’t get is why repeating a chorus where it’s not explicitly written would be breach of copyright anyway even if it was still in force. I guess that’s why I’m not a solicitor…
I would argue that we re-arranged nothing. We simply decided to sing the song one and a half times. Or perhaps that we were going to sing it twice, but then got bored and stopped early.
Just to demonstrate the pointlessness of it all.
In the UK copyright ends 70 years after the author’s death. In the case of reprints, these are called ‘editions’, and even though the author may be dead 200 years, the publisher of the ‘edition’ can keep copyright for something like 20 years (maybe 15 years – can remember exactly right now).
Let’s take any book from http://www.Gutenberg.org – say Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The author, Lewis Carroll, clearly died more than 70 years ago, which means the original text is now in the public domain. But let’s say that a well known publisher decides to publish it again for a modern audience – this ‘edition’ would NOT be public domain, until 15-20 (whatever it is) years after the ‘edition’ was published. So even though the original text is public domain, you could not go and buy this new ‘edition’ and start making copies of it, not until the ‘edition’ was out of copyright. You would need to find an older ‘edition’ or the original text.
So in your case, if the sheet music was printed in 1901, and the author (or arranger) was dead more than 70 years, you should be able to do what you like to it – re-arrange it if you wish, photocopy it a million times, whatever. Interestingly – if you did re-arrange it, your arrangement would be copyright to you – and may remain so until 70 years after your death (worth looking into?).
Take Vaughan Williams for instance, famous for taking traditional folk songs and making classical arrangements of them. The folk songs remain public domain, but his arrangement is copyright to Vaughan until 70 after his clogs pop.
What larks.