John Howell wrote:
At 11:29 AM +0200 9/4/05, Johannes Gebauer wrote:
Furthermore I'd like to add: there are special copyrights in Europe
for publishing previously unpublished music. Even if a piece was
composed 500 years ago a publisher can claim the "publication rights"
which will, as far as I understand, give him the sole right for
publication, and indeed performance (this is usually regulated through
a special agency, where standard rates apply for performance).
There is something similar under U.S. law, although I've never read a
clear explanation of it.
There is also the matter of private ownership of unique objects, which
normally applies to works of graphic or plastic art but may also apply
to musical unica. This has nothing to do with copyright per se, but
strictly involves the right of the owner to grant or forbid access to
the objects. In the case of music, then, while the music on the page
may properly be in the public domain, the page itself is privately
owned. My understanding is that this is the case with some (much?) of
the music of Fanny Mendelssohn Henzle, which is owned and therefore
controlled by a single individual in unique copies which he will not
make available to scholars, let alone publishers. Under the special
provisions Johannes cites above, if he were to publish them he would
presumably control their copyrights for ... hmm, how long, I wonder?
John
What I understand of the US law is that it is very much like what
Johannes describes -- a person owning a manuscript which has never
before been published, even though the author may be long dead and way
past any copyright which may have existed in such a work, has the right
to full copyright of that work, as if it were a work copyrighted by a
company. In other words, a single 90 year term, rather than
life-plus-70, since the author is already dead.
But the work must never before have been published, which may well be
difficult to prove. How can one prove a negative? I guess the only way
a person could prove that it HAD been previously published would be to
produce a copy of the previous publication, or at the very least a
catalog listing it for sale, or an old library catalog showing that the
work had been in its inventory at some point.
And the ownership of the original of the work being published would have
to be clearly established, just as in the case Johannes pointed to where
two different singakademies were arguing that each owned the original.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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