Good points. Hmmmmmm ... another can of worms.
Dean
On Nov 15, 2006, at 1:13 PM, John Howell wrote:
At 1:05 PM -0500 11/15/06, dhbailey wrote:
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.
Quite true, but unless I remember incorrectly the English
translation of the original German lyrics may still be in
copyright. Or I might be thinking of the "What Child Is This"
lyrics for Greensleeves. Or those may be late 19th century
translations that are PD in any case at this late date.
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.
And that gets into the tangle of what, exactly, defines
"publication," although there's probably a legal definition
somewhere. What, in other words, is the status of music that
survives in manuscript (sometimes multiple manuscripts) from before
the first publication of music set in movable type in 1501?
"Publication" WAS by manuscript copies through most of music
history! And it was in multiple copies, but copies made one at a
time by individual scribes or teams in a professional scriptorium.
I've never seen a satisfactory explanation of that question.
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
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http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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Dean M. Estabrook
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Have you ever heard of an eleven or thirteen step program?
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