| on 12/18/02 7:20 PM, Phil Taylor at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: | | > It's a bit more complicated than that. | > Try here: | > http://www.unc.edu/~unclng/public-d.htm
That's a useful summary; I've bookmarked it. tglaab writes: | The book or collection is the protected work, the tunes themselves are | public domain? One of the more useful explanations I've run across makes the distinction between the words (or notes) and the printed representation. In the US and most countries, either can be covered by copyright. People usually confuse the two, and you can clear up confusion by talking about the distinction. One example is: The works of Shakespeare are long out of copyright. But if you look at a published edition of his works, you'll find copyright notices. How can this be? Is the publisher making a fraudulent claim? Probably not. What is covered by copyright in this case is the specific physical representation of Shakespeare's words. You can't run the book through a copier and sell the copies. But you can retype them or perform them without paying any royalties, because then you aren't producing a copy of that edition. You are producing Shakespeare's words, which are public domain. This applies pretty directly to music. Most collections of old tunes have copyright notices. This means that you can't legally copy the book and sell the copies. But you can use the tunes, which are public domain. And you can produce your own book with some of the same tunes, as long as you don't sell a physical copy of someone else's edition. You have to retype it all yourself. (You probably want to find more than one source, but that's for scholarly reasons, and not for copyright reasons.) We've already heard of a few cases where a publisher has objected to an online ABC version of a tune. The person with the web site sends back a message saying "That tune was published in 1783 by so-and-so; how do you claim to own it?" The publisher slinks away and isn't heard from again. But if it's a new tune, the tune itself is covered by copyright law, just as a new play is covered. You have to get permission to use the tune for any purpose other than the fairly strict "fair use". An ABC version on your web site may not legally be a "copy", but it is like making a recording or playing the tune in public. If you don't have permission to use the tune, it's probably not legal. We haven't yet reached the point where you can be arrested for walking down the street whistling a copyrighted tune. But the recent case where the Girl Scouts were sued for permitting girls to sing copyrighted songs around the campfire is a good hint as to where we're headed. In the case of songs, you have the complication that the tune may be public domain but the lyrics are new and covered by copyright. So a hand-written or ABC version of the tune would be legal, but you'd need permission to include the words. An interesting aspect to ABC transcriptions is that I've sent email asking permission for maybe 100 or so tunes, and so far I've only had one rejection. That was from the composer's agent, not from the composer. When the composer gets the request, the response is usually "What's this ABC notation?" So I send my transcription of the tune with a brief tutorial explaining it. I get back a corrected version, including a copyright notice and an email or web address. Sometimes they include more information, such as lists of recordings. What's going on, I think, is that tune writers want their tunes used. If nobody is playing your tune, you get neither fame nor fortune from it. They realize that ABC is a way to spread the tune around. ABC is just a "fake-book" notation, not at all pretty. But if contact information is included in the ABC headers, it's a solution to an old problem: How does a musician find the composer to ask permission? With "folk" tunes, this is a problem. An ABC version with contact information solves the problem nicely. And if people send around the ABC version, the contact info goes along with it. This may be happening with some publishers, too. I have the online O'Neill's and Ryan/Cole collections. I've included prominent links to Mel Bay as the current publisher. I've gotten a few emails from people saying that they downloaded a few tunes, and then bought the printed collection. I don't know if the folks at Mel Bay are aware of the ABC versions of these collections. If they are, I'd guess that they understand that 1) the music is out of copyright, 2) the ABC transcriptions aren't legally copies, and 3) this may be good advertising for their print editions. I do try to make it work this way. Mel Bay has done us a real service in reprinting these old collections. The Cole edition of Ryan's collection stripped out all attribution and gave no credit to the original editor or publisher. The Mel Bay edition, with Patrick Sky as editor, includes a lot of good history. So if you see the Cole collection, don't buy it. Buy the Mel Bay edition instead. Encourage good scholarship and full attribution, even if you aren't legally required to do so. (This is getting long-winded ... ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
