At 4:30 PM -0400 10/24/07, David W. Fenton wrote: The quotation in question was from me, and I was not saying that at all. I was saying that the copyright term of a printed edition *as an edition* can be independent of the copyright term of the work conveyed in that edition. An edition of a public domain work (i.e., one whose copyright term has already expired) is still copyrighted.
Absolutely correct. BUT, we always have to keep in mind that the original work, once in the public domain, remains in the public domain and CAN NEVER AGAIN BE RE-COPYRIGHTED. It is only the original scholarship or intellectual "value-added" that is covered by the new copyright (and possibly, in Europe, the page layout, although that has never been covered under U.S. law).
I don't give much credence to the argument that public domain copies are being squirreled away in private collections so people have to buy new, copyrighted editions. There are entirely too many public, university, and other readily available libraries in the world not to be able to track down a PD copy of most things. But in many cases the new editions may be too valuable to ignore, like the new editions of Sousa marches that purport to employ the performance practices that Sousa himself employed, in contrast to the ways he published them.
This does not include Riccordi, of course, which has been sitting on many original Verdi scores and forbidding scholars to study them, the result of which is forcing orchestras and orchestra managers to compile and share errata lists for many of his works. Or the guy who is supposed to be sitting on the original Fanny Mendelssohn Hensle scores. In those cases, the works exist in unique copies and there ARE no other copies available.
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
