Darcy James Argue wrote calling attention to the reaction of the owner
of the ISMLP to receiving two C&D letters from Universal Edition. I have
some perspectives on this that I have not seen mentioned before in this
thread.
First, to establish my postion, I would note that I am opposed to the
trend to ever longer copyright periods. I would prefer something shorter
than "death plus 70", but if the copyright holder was limited to the
"natural persons" that are the actual "authors and inventors", as
specified in the language of the U.S. constitution, I find this barely
tolerable. I am much less accepting of allowing the transfer to
copyright to an outside party like a corporation. The corporation never
created anything, it was created by individual persons, working alone,
or in a group, and the persons directly involved in the creation should
receive the copyright period.
Next a couple of points about ISMLP: I know that there are copyright
concepts in the member states of the EU that are expressly prohibited in
the U.S. The 2002 publication by Oxford University Press "Weddings for
Choirs" includes Stanford's "Beati quorum via", and claims copyright,
though the music has been in the public domain since 1995 under the
"death plus 70" rule. The basis for the copyright claim is the layout of
the page, not the music. I don't know to whether Austria subscribes to
the notion of "graphic copyright" or not, but if they do, it may be that
while the music of some of the composers whose music is being objected
to are in the public domain by virtue of age, that scans of the pages of
later works may subject to copyright, and therefore infringing in some
jurisdictions.
Finally, why didt the owner of ISMLP close down the site? I believe if I
had been in his place, I would have temporarily removed the offending
scores, and demanded more information on exactly what copyright
infringement is being claimed. In my view, shutting down the site was
overkill.
ns
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