Re: Excellent paper on 'Copyfraud'

[David Kastrup]

Urs Liska <address@hidden> writes:

> 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 definitely _is_ scholarly work, yes.  But that does not make it
protected.  We have
<URL:http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urheberrecht#Erfordernis_der_Originalit.C3.A4t>

Also see
<URL:http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Bundesgerichtshof_-_Apfel-Madonna>

> 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.

Not really.  A scientific paper may be copyrightable as such, but the
scientific content of it isn't.  Do you think that Einstein's heirs can
prohibit any unlicensed application of special relativity for decades to
come?  No.  They still can prohibit unlicensed reproduction of his
original articles, however.

> Therefore in Germany (I don't know where else this applies) you can
> register' a scholarly edition of a work otherwise out of copyright.

Most certainly.  But if someone uses this scholarly edition for
reproducing the _contents_ of an existing manuscript (a good scholarly
edition should make that feasible), that's out of the league 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.

And if the scholarly edition is a proper scholarly edition, it will be
possible to extract _just_ the contents of the original composition.

-- 
David Kastrup