John Howell wrote:
Case in point: the BG edition of Bach as opposed to the NBA edition.
No question that the editors of BOTH editions devoted major portions
of their lives and scholarship to producing those editions. The
research on just a single piece of music can cover a year or more.
But I'm sure that there are plenty of unambiguous pieces for which the
only editorial contribution is to modernize key signatures and clefs.
Is that enough to claim a new copyright? Obviously Bärenreiter's
attorneys answered this "yes."
One thing to consider in the case of copyright, as I understand it in
the U.S. Anyone can claim copyright, and can institute civil procedures
to enforce the copyright they claim. However, there is no proof of
originality required to claim copyright! That proof occurs only if the
copyright is challenged, and goes to trial, then the courts, or the jury
gets to decide whether merely changing clefs and modernizing key
signatures consitute significant new content, or not. Though I am not an
attorney, my sense based on the case law I have reviewed relative to
music is that key signature and clefs would not, in and of themselves,
be considered adequate new content to sustain the new copyright. So,
copyright can be claimed for changes as little as respelling a chord, or
changing a word, and they will stand until challenged, but if they were
challenged, I doubt that this type of minimal change would be sufficient
to sustain the claim.
P.S. Can anyone familiar with European law answer one question?
Given that there is a recognized graphic copyright on page layout, can
it possibly last longer than the underlying copyright on the contents
of those pages? That seems to be what the UE claims are all about, at
least in some cases.
I don't claim to be "familiar with European law", but I understand that
in the case of the UK, the graphical copyright is for 25 years from date
of publication. This is the basis for the claim of copyright by OUP in
their 2002 publication, _Weddings for Choirs_, in which they claim a
2002 copyright on C. V. Stanford's (died 1924) "Beati quorum via"
(Boosey, 1904). So it is not that the claim necessarily "lasts longer".
One of the composers whose work I remember from UE's list is Alban Berg;
Berg died in 1935, and if Austria uses Death +70, his work would have
entered the public domain in 2005. But if Austria acknowledges a claim
of "graphic copyright" as part of it's copyright statue in the same way
Great Britain does, as I understand it, and if UE published an edition
of a composition of Berg's in 1998, then the musical contents might be
in the public domain (that is, one might legitimately hand copy the
music), but a scan of the UE edition would be an infringement for
someone in the EU.
I don't know for certain that this is the basis for UE's claim of
copyright in some of the items on the list, but the construct does seem
to explain why UE would be claiming copyright on works where the
composer has been dead for more than 70 years.
ns
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