Silent Night, having been written in the early 1800s is most definitely
in the public domain now, so you'd be safe unless you took someone
else's copyrighted arrangement of it and then kept most of that and
added a little bit yourself.
But you are free to do all the arrangement of the original Silent Night
tune you want -- it's readily available in public domain publications so
there'd be no case against you from any descendants of Gruber.
But the wide availability of the works in HAM is what's in question. If
you can find them in publications which predate 1923 you're all set.
The problem is that most of that era's music in current form is from the
middle of the 1900s or more recent, so unless you can find a provable
public domain edition, you might not have a defense.
It gets curiouser and curiouser as the most recent rewrites of the
copyright law have stipulated that the owner of a manuscript which has
NEVER been published, despite its age, owns the copyright in that
manuscript should he/she decide to publish it. So if you find some old
book bound with music papers which contain a manuscript aria by Bach,
you would own the copyright in that aria as long as it hasn't been
published ever before. If, however, it was published during Bach's
lifetime, or at any point since, you don't own the copyight even though
you may own the original manuscript.
Boy, the folks who came up with "what a tangled web we weave when first
we practice to deceive" got it wrong. They should have changed
"practice to deceive" to be "copyright." :-)
David H. Bailey
Dean M. Estabrook wrote:
Wow ... it just gets curiouser and curiouser. Your points are well
taken. Actually, the arrangement is for Band. and I'm basically done
with it. It will receive some public performances, but I don't, at
present, have plans to publish unless it's wildly successful, of course.
The thought crossed my mind, what about a tune like, say, "Silent
Night," which, I'm sure, is arranged a hundred times a year. I assume
it's in PD, but is it possible that the estate of Franz Gruber or some
other entity has the basic copyright on it and the law just keeps
getting broken? I mean, if I were to arrange it, I wouldn't consult any
written version, I'd just take it out of my brain and do it ... I don't
know, it is confusing.
[snip]
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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