From: allyn@milton.u.washington.edu (Allyn Weaks)
Subject: Re: Copyright (Was: standard representation of music)
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 1992 09:18:49 GMT

From: ketil@edb.tih.no (Ketil Albertsen,TIH) writes:
>Do you have any idea of what that copyright covers? That is, can they
>copyright the "logical" contents - the parts, dynamic variations etc. -
>or only the typographical layout of this?

They can copyright pretty much anything that they've added themselves.  So
if the dynamic marking is in the original public domain piece, that's not
copyrightable on it's own, though the exact positioning may be.  But you
need to be very careful, especially with early music - a modern edition
(even 'urtext') has lots more stuff added by the editor than you might
think.  It takes a lot of work and decision making to make an edition even
from a single baroque source, let alone if there are multiple sources to be
compared, or if the music is earlier than baroque.

A short list of things that an editor decides:

Obvious mistakes and misprints in the original. Many editions correct these
'silently' - without a footnote that there's a correction.

Accidentals: baroque conventions were different than ours about how long an
accidental lasts; earlier music may not have written them in at all (musica
ficta).

Note values: many editions cut the original note values in half or more
(e.g. making whole notes into quarter notes) to make it look more normal to
modern musicians.

Clefs: early music used tons more clefs than we do now; most get translated
into standard treble and bass clefs, and maybe alto for strings.

Rhythms: early music is often ambiguous about how to interpret rhythms.
Even into the renaissance, it can be tricky to tell if a breve consists of
two semibreves, or three.  And when you get to an obvious time change, such
as from duple to triple time, do you go faster, or do you go slower?  Often
enough it's not obvious.

Text: underlay, or whether a section of text is repeated, spelling
transcriptions, or even what the text is at all (sometimes it comes from a
completely different source)...

The best way to get an idea of the things editors do is to find a facsimile
of something baroque, and do up your own edition from scratch.  There are
plenty of books around such as Donington's _The Interpretation of Early
Music_, (Norton) to help out with the differences from modern conventions.
Then start in on Morley's _Plain and Easy Introduction..._ (available in
facsimile, but out of print; most decent libraries have it.  Also a modern
edition that isn't much good, as the musical examples have been modernized
so that they no longer match the text) to learn about renaissance 'white'
notation and do an edition of his exercises (which are fun to play in any
case).  The main conclusion that you'll probably reach is that no modern
edition is an acceptable substitute for the original, and it will teach you
what to look for in a modern edition so you don't stuck with a really bad
one (in the cases where you have a choice, anyway.)  Oh yes, there's also a
little paperback called something like _Editing Early Music_, but I don't
remember the author or publisher.

>If I buy a single printed copy of a published score and manually type
>it into my music editor, then print it out on my printer - may I
>distribute this printout freely? It will have a different layout,
>different line lengths and weights, different text fonts for the
>lyrics, maybe some interpretation hints are added and others removed,
>but it will all be *based* on the copyrighted score.

You can do this for yourself as "fair use", but you almost certainly can't
distribute it if the original you took it from is still under copyright.
What you've described is a "derivative work", and can be (and usually is)
prohibited by the original copyright holder.

The easiest rule of thumb is that if you have actual paper/media that came
out before 1917 (75 years ago) it is safely in the public domain and you
can do whatever you want to with it.  But if you have a later printing of a
'safe' edition, you need to be careful, because any corrections in the
printing may allow the newer edition to have it's own copyright as a
derivative work.  So if you can find an original Liber Usualis from 1914,
you can photocopy it and put it back in print (I very much hope that Dover
will do this), but if you have a copy dating from 1936, you probably can't.

Modern facsimiles I'm not altogether clear about.  My understanding is that
if you have a facsimile, you can put out your own edition based on it with
no trouble, but you can't photocopy or scan it and give that out.  Which is
fair, since it can take a lot of effort to produce a good readable
facsimile, and someone who goes to the trouble deserves their fee for it,
so that they'll do it with other works. 

Allyn Weaks
allyn@milton.u.washington.edu

From: knotts@hpl-opus.hpl.hp.com (Tom Knotts)
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1992 21:09:57 GMT
Subject: Re: Recordings of Bach's harpsichord concertos
Organization: HP Labs, High Speed Electronics Dept., Palo Alto, CA