| Confooozin. and all gray areas. I liked the "money changing hands" idea.
It's not necessarily all that grey. And "money changing hands" is
irrelevant to copyright. Otherwise, if I had a grudge against you, I
could make copies of your stuff and give them out for free, thus
ending your income from selling them. This is effectively what
Microsoft did to Netscape. Only someone (or some corporation) with
lots of money to spend on lawyers can get away with this sort of
trick. The intent of copyright law is to give you total control over
the right to copy your own creation. You don't have to have a reason,
and you don't have to show monetary damages.
| I also liked the conceptual differences between a traditional tune, an
| arrangement of that tune and a performance of that tune -- and the copyright
| (or lack of) differences between them.
This is something that publishers routinely gloss over, in an attempt
to claim more than they have a right to. If you look into your books
of trad tunes, you'll see lots of simple copyright notices, with no
clue as to whether it's the tunes or the specific printed edition
that's under copyright. This is done intentionally, with the hope
that you'll pay them for the right to use a tune that's in the public
domain. If you know enough to challenge their claim, perhaps by
saying that you have a version from such-and-such a publication from
1823, they'll quietly stop trying to get money from you. But if you
pay them for the right to use a tune, they'll accept your money and
not mention the fact that you didn't need to pay unless you are
copying their specific version.
Sometimes you'll see things like "Arrangement copyright ...", which
is specific and a lot more honest. But this isn't common.
To discover what is actually protected by copyright can be tricky.
You really have to do your own research. Publishers will attempt to
make the maximum claim and hope you believe them. Anyone can claim a
copyright on anything, and a great many such claims are fraudulent.
Lawyers make a good living from this sort of confusion.
At the other extreme, I have my copy of the Collins edition of
O'Neill's Music of Ireland here. Looking through the first and last
pages turns up no copyright notices at all. The work has long been
public domain, of course, and this publisher is being honest about
the fact. The Collins edition would be covered by copyright, of
course, and if you were to sell copies of it, they could sue you. But
aside from their work in producing the printed books, they have no
claim on the material. This was discussed a few years back, when the
project got underway to transcribe all of this book into ABC. The
conclusion was that the contents were in fact public domain, and an
ABC version wouldn't be any sort of violation.
I now have this transcription housed on my web site, and I haven't
heard anything from any publisher. Well, there was one minor contact.
I found that it's now published by Mel Bay, so I put a link to their
web site in my list of current sources. I got an email message from
someone at Mel Bay thanking me for including the link.
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