Klarinet Archive - Posting 000030.txt from 2010/07

From: Joseph Wakeling <joseph.wakeling@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Sheet music copyright
Date: Mon, 05 Jul 2010 05:35:17 -0400

On 07/04/2010 11:59 PM, Martin Baxter wrote:
> J understand that if you (photo)copy a modern edition of Mozart that,
> although the music is out of copyrite, both the editorial markings and
> the physical appearance of the page are still likely to be in copyrite
> and thus both the publisher and the editor have their rights infringed.

This is an area that I only recently started looking at in any detail.
It's true what you say, but my understanding is that the copyright for
scholarly/urtext editions (at least for the musical text; forewords,
afterwords etc. would be different) may be of a shorter term than for an
entirely original work:
http://imslp.org/wiki/Public_domain#Urtext_or_Critical_Editions

... and even then, a copyright claim would probably depend on the type
of changes made: minor editorial alterations may not be enough. (Note
that IMSLP is based in Canada, where they have a higher 'originality
threshold' than many other countries; this certainly seems like an
aspect of copyright law that is strongly non-uniform across different
territories.)

On the other hand you may recall the case a few years ago where Hyperion
Records lost an expensive court case over the question of whether they
had to pay performance fees to the editor of scholarly editions of
compositions by Michel Richard Delalande (1657--1726): the level of
artistic inventiveness necessary to produce the editions was held to be
sufficiently great that it was ruled to count, in copyright and
performance terms, as an original work.
http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/markup.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2004/1530.html
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