At 11:08 PM -0700 10/23/07, Mark D Lew wrote:
While I recognize that, as a matter of law, the status of "graphic copyrights" in the United States is ambiguous and arguable -- exactly the sort of ambiguity in copyright law I complained about elsewhere -- as a matter of political philosophy, I have no problem whatsoever with graphic copyright.
There is nothing ambiguous or arguable about graphic copyright under U.S. law: it does not exist, and never has.
If you make a new edition of a public domain work, your edition ought to be protected, and I don't think there's any benefit in requiring it to meet some hard-to-pinpoint standard of added creative value. As anyone who has taken it upon himself to re-engrave an old score knows, it's almost impossible NOT to add some editorial value. The very act of making an edition is interpreting it in some way -- if it weren't, you'd just photocopy the original and not make an edition at all.
Yes, that would be a facsimile, and would not be entitled to a new copyright. And again, I'm not sure where you are seeing a vague "hard-to-pinpoint standard." If the original is in the public domain it remains in the public domain. There is nothing about that that's hard to pinpoint. Therefore, all that can be covered in an edition copyright is what is added to the edition.
But entirely aside from these quibbles, the obvious problem is how the copyright laws of Country A can be or should be enforced in and by Country B. And that apparently IS hard to pinpoint, and is the whole point of this discussion.
John -- John R. Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
