I have a few problems with the whole copyright issue, which can be tied to one particular instance: the matter of xerox's of a facsimile. (Which carries over into scans of a facsimile, etc.)
Except in the odd case of the recent Broude Brothers re-issue of the Odhecaton facsimile in which they chose to add a part that the editor deemed 'missing', I can't think of cases where a facsimile does other than to try to recreate the original, warts and all. The value in a [well-done] is that it mimics the original in weight, feel, looks, etc. Making a copy or scan from a page of a facsimile creates a far-less-accurate copy of the original facsimile and indeed, the original work. So much so, in fact, that it is not possible to tell, looking at it, whether the scan or copy is from the original or the facsimile. So what is copyright in this case? Take the original Odhecaton issue: Was the work of the composers and Petrucci's editor in copyright? Was the compilation (dated 1501-1504) in copyright? Somehow, I don't think so. But Broude Brothers copyrighted the facsimile. What did they copyright? If it is the works that were copyrighted, from whom did BB get permission to reprint? Likewise, the original publisher. While these questions seem stupid, they aren't. (There is, of course, the fact that the owners of the original/s who allowed BB to make their issue granted them permission: but under the current copyright law, at least in the US, I don't believe that ownership of paper transfers ownership of the material on the paper, or we'd all own the music on every sheet we've ever bought. Somehow, that doesn't fit into the copyright ideology, though.) And now that they've reissued it, with their minor changes (which certainly wouldn't qualify under the old 25% rule, and that rule has changed as well) what have they copyrighted? Is a scan of James James James not copyrighted, but a scan of Izac's Benedictus copyrighted? This subject is of particular interest to me, because I'm planning, next year, to refurbish and reopen my web site on "reading and transcribing renaissance music". In it, I originally provided scans of four pages from the original BB facsimile. I included them, originally, in the belief that I had copied Petrucci's printing (~400 years past copyright) and Mouton's compositional work (also ~400 years out of copyright by any definition,) and not the things that make a facsimile valueable: look, feel, etc. Am I now not going to be able to do this? What if I pay Ross Duffin for his Fossombrone font and reset the piece in its entirety, then post a PDF of that work. Is that work then actionable under Broude Brother's international copyright and US copyright law? What is the difference between me re-typesetting (and thus changing nothing) music contained in a copyright collection? [Note, I'm not talking editing: there is no editing necessary because the whole purpose of the web page is to make clear(er) what any interested amateur can do with music in original notation. If anything, James James James is an over-simple example, because editing is pretty much limited to deciding how to deal with the coloration in the transcription!) On Nov 20, 2007 2:23 PM, marigold castle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Thus recording your copyright is a very valuable thing assuming you have the patience and wherewithal to record a copyright which not everyone does. > And...assuming that there is great value in what you are copyrighting. Otherwise, it is not worth the cost of sending in the application. Some people will do it anyway, because the process and the certificate, themselves, bear value to them and their families. More power to them. But I'd remind people that "everything must be patented!!!!!!" is the cant that got the US patent office so glutted with applications that they started, indeed, patenting everything: simple processes (like the byte-swap-algorithm) which any amateur playing with a microprocessor will figure out for themselves in about 2 minutes to genetically-modified mice (which are not processes themselves, and were created using processes which, themselves, were already patented.) So I'd be interested if anyone has gotten an actual legal opinion on scans and copies of facsimiles vs scans or copies of originals. (Even if the opinion is, "this is still so complicated that no one can figure it out, and they probably never will.) ray To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
