Source: https://www.mediainstitute.org/2013/08/13/opera-and-copyright/
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 02:28:40+00:00

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It’s the summer opera festival season, and I’m writing this column from the Glimmerglass Festival (the other major attraction of Cooperstown, N.Y.), so I thought a contribution on opera and copyright would be fun and topical. It turns out that operas set the stage for the articulation of important principles in copyright law in 18th- and 19th-century Britain. Not surprisingly, given the easy itinerancy of music and musicians, many of the disputes concerned international copyright issues or at least provided an international ambiance.
An early controversy1 concerns an aria by the Anglo-Italian Stephen Storace, written for his sister Nancy (who was Mozart’s first Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro in Vienna in 1786) as a showpiece to interpolate into a 1787 London performance of Giovanni Paisiello’s opera Il Re Teodoro in Venezia. (Paisiello’s work is little known today, apart from a set of Beethoven piano variations, WoO 70, based on the aria “Nel Cor Piu’ Non Mi Sento,” but Paisiello was a prolific opera composer who lived to see his most successful work, The Barber of Seville, eclipsed – and parodied – by Rossini.) Within days of the performance, Longman (a leading publisher who figured in many British copyright cases) published the aria, without Storace’s authorization. Storace sought redress through the courts and in the market. He reset the aria in English and included it in a 1788 opera called The Doctor and the Apothecary. The aria, “How Mistaken Is the Lover,” remains in the repertory; you can listen to it, performed by soprano Patrice Michaels, here.
Storace ultimately prevailed in court as well. The decision, Storace v. Longman (1788) is unreported, but is referred to in Clementi v. Golding (28 Feb. 1809) 2 Camp 25, 170 ER 1069, (12 May 1809) 11 East 244, 103 ER 998, which also involved the unauthorized publication of an operatic aria (on which more, below). Storace’s case appears not to have presented an international copyright issue because Storace primarily resided in England, and was, by his mother, an Englishman, and the aria was first published in England. Rather, the defendant objected that Storace lacked standing because he did not own the copyright. According to one report of Clementi v. Golding, the defendant’s counsel urged that Storace’s “song was composed to be sung by her [Nancy Storace] at the Italian Opera; and that all compositions so performed were the property of the house, not of the composer.” In modern terms, the defendant argued that the aria was a work made for hire, whose copyright vested in the commissioning party, rather than in the creator. Happily for Storace, “Lord Kenyon said, that this defence could not be supported; that the statute vests the property in the author; and that no such private regulation [the custom and practice of the Italian Opera house] could interfere with the public right.” The decision thus struck an at least momentary blow for authors, by emphasizing that the first owner of copyright is the creator of the work.
Clementi v. Golding, the case that recounts the Storace affair, is an important landmark in musical copyright because the court of King’s Bench held that the unauthorized printing of a single song (“Heigh Ho!”) from a complete opera (Two Faces Under a Hood by William Schield) infringed the copyright in the song as an independent work. In this respect, Clementi went further than Storace and Bach v. Longman (1777) 2 Cowp. 623, another signal music copyright ruling, albeit not one involving an opera. There, Johann Christian Bach (youngest surviving son of Johann Sebastian), a German resident in England, complained of the unauthorized publication of his sonatas for keyboard. Defendants objected that the Statute of Anne covered books, not musical compositions, but Lord Mansfield creatively applied the term “books and other writings” in the preamble of the Statute of Anne to interpret the statutory category of “any book” to cover musical scores.2 Storace concerned the sheet music for a single aria, but the aria was initially a stand-alone work, and in any event, the defendants did not urge that a single sheet could not be a “book” within the meaning of the statute. Clementi resolved the issue of whether distinct components of a larger musical work, when published separately, could be protectable works in their own right.
Excerpts from operas returned to the courts in d’Almaine v. Boosey (1835) 160 E.R. 117, involving melodies from the 1834 opera Lestocq, by Daniel François Auber, recomposed as dance music by Philipe Musard and published by Boosey without the authorization of the British publisher to whom Auber had assigned his rights for Britain. The case presented issues of international copyright and of copyright scope. First, did Auber, as a French composer resident in France, have any rights to assign for Britain? Second, if the opera did enjoy a British copyright, did the right extend to chamber music adaptations of the score?
The court thus effectively ratified the practice of bringing non-resident foreign-authored works within the ambit of the British law by arranging for first publication in Britain. Manipulation of the place of first publication so as to achieve some degree of international copyright protection proved an essential tactic not only for composers, but also for book authors, particularly American authors, who otherwise were prey to piracy in a major English-language market – as were British authors in the United States (as Dickens and other British authors frequently complained).
1. The first British case concerning an opera appears to be Gay v. Read (1729), in which John Gay was awarded a preliminary injunction against the unauthorized printing of Polly, an Opera (better known as The Beggar’s Opera), followed in 1737 (after Gay had died) by a permanent injunction. The decisions are unreported, though notes of the pleadings and outcomes can be found in the National Archives; for Gay v. Read, see c.33 351/305, reprinted at the website “Primary Sources on Copyright.” For the permanent injunction, see Baller v. Watson, c.33 369/315. The litigation is discussed in Ronan Deazley, On the Origin of the Right to Copy: Charting the Movement of Copyright Law in Eighteenth-Century Britain: 1695-1775, pp. 60-64 (2004). The documents primarily dispute whether Gay’s own publication of his opera properly complied with the requisite statutory formalities, so the case tells us little about the practice of “pirating” operas in whole or in part.
2. For an analysis of the significance of Bach v. Longman, see Anne Barron, “Copyright Law’s Musical Work,” 15 Social Legal Studies 101, 116-19 (March 2006).
3. 2 Atk. at 143, 26 Eng. Rep., p. 490.
4. (1835) 1 Y & C Ex at 302, 160 Eng. Rep., p. 123.
5. For further analysis of d’Almaine, see Anne Barron, “Copyright Law’s Musical Work,” supra, at 120-22 (also pointing out that d’Almaine may be the first English judicial recognition of the Romantic Author).
6. Sheldon v. Metro-Goldwyn Pictures Corp., 81 F.2d 49, 56 (2d Cir. 1936).
7. 160 Eng. Rep., p. 122.
8. For a fuller discussion, see Ronan Deazley, “Commentary on Jeffreys v. Boosey,” and Catherine Seville, The Internationalisation of Copyright Law: Books, Buccaneers and the Black Flag in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 185-89 (2006).
9. International Copyright Act (1891) 26 Stat. 1106.

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