Amen, brother!!
DEan
On Nov 15, 2006, at 10:05 AM, dhbailey wrote:
Silent Night, having been written in the early 1800s is most
definitely in the public domain now, so you'd be safe unless you
took someone else's copyrighted arrangement of it and then kept
most of that and added a little bit yourself.
But you are free to do all the arrangement of the original Silent
Night tune you want -- it's readily available in public domain
publications so there'd be no case against you from any descendants
of Gruber.
But the wide availability of the works in HAM is what's in
question. If you can find them in publications which predate 1923
you're all set. The problem is that most of that era's music in
current form is from the middle of the 1900s or more recent, so
unless you can find a provable public domain edition, you might not
have a defense.
It gets curiouser and curiouser as the most recent rewrites of the
copyright law have stipulated that the owner of a manuscript which
has NEVER been published, despite its age, owns the copyright in
that manuscript should he/she decide to publish it. So if you find
some old book bound with music papers which contain a manuscript
aria by Bach, you would own the copyright in that aria as long as
it hasn't been published ever before. If, however, it was
published during Bach's lifetime, or at any point since, you don't
own the copyight even though you may own the original manuscript.
Boy, the folks who came up with "what a tangled web we weave when
first we practice to deceive" got it wrong. They should have
changed "practice to deceive" to be "copyright." :-)
David H. Bailey
Dean M. Estabrook wrote:
Wow ... it just gets curiouser and curiouser. Your points are
well taken. Actually, the arrangement is for Band. and I'm
basically done with it. It will receive some public performances,
but I don't, at present, have plans to publish unless it's wildly
successful, of course. The thought crossed my mind, what about a
tune like, say, "Silent Night," which, I'm sure, is arranged a
hundred times a year. I assume it's in PD, but is it possible
that the estate of Franz Gruber or some other entity has the basic
copyright on it and the law just keeps getting broken? I mean, if
I were to arrange it, I wouldn't consult any written version, I'd
just take it out of my brain and do it ... I don't know, it is
confusing.
[snip]
--
David H. Bailey
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Dean M. Estabrook
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Have you ever heard of an eleven or thirteen step program?
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