Re: Mutopia and copyright

[David Raleigh Arnold]

Wow.  I wasn't trying to stir things up, just to clarify some
stuff.  If it benefits composers, I'm for it, even if it only
makes them feel better about their grandchildren's prospects.

There are more Broadway shows coming into pd every year.  That era
extends from 1914's "Girl from Utah" as rewritten by Jerome Kern,
to ALW.  Putting up scores and parts would be a valuable service
to High Schools, most of which produce one every
year.  They usually don't have the voices to do Sigmund Romberg or
others of that pre-Broadway-dominance crew.  

(I would be happy to wait *forever* for ALW to come into the
public
domain.)  :-)

> Extension of copyright is "natural" process, a product of the vested
> interests of copyright-holders (eg. Dysney studios).

So the 50 years is all that the corporations get if they
themselves copyright something, and they want it to be 90 so they
can start copyrighting stuff again and not have to let authors
copyright whatever the corporation wants to use?  That may be what
they *want* to do, but I don't think it does anything but increase
the value of the copyright as you increase the years, so it still
benefits authors.  I don't see how more years weakens their
bargaining position.  :-)

You are probably right about the US going to 70 years, and you are
probably right about the reason, but  there must have been some
kind of arguments made in favor of it.  I still want to know what
they were.

-- 
     DaveA (Debian User)=====================
        ars sine scientia nihil
                    =================