Re: Excellent paper on 'Copyfraud'

[Tim Slattery]

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.

-- 
Tim Slattery
address@hidden