At 8:52 PM -0700 10/24/07, Mark D Lew wrote:
On Oct 24, 2007, at 7:40 PM, John Howell wrote:
There is nothing ambiguous or arguable about
graphic copyright under U.S. law: it does not
exist, and never has.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I didn't mean to suggest
that graphic copyright exists under U.S. law. I
meant to suggest that it's not always clearly
established whether an edition is really an
edition (which gets full protection) or is
merely a facsimile (which gets no protection).
Ay! The divil's in the details! Case in point:
the BG edition of Bach as opposed to the NBA
edition. No question that the editors of BOTH
editions devoted major portions of their lives
and scholarship to producing those editions. The
research on just a single piece of music can
cover a year or more. But I'm sure that there
are plenty of unambiguous pieces for which the
only editorial contribution is to modernize key
signatures and clefs. Is that enough to claim a
new copyright? Obviously Bärenreiter's attorneys
answered this "yes."
Or a more easily seen example: There is a class
of modern editors of music for children's choirs
who seem to be convinced that if they change one
note of an original aria by, say, Handel, or
change one word of the text, or leave out a
phrase, that is sufficient to give them a new
copyright. My reaction is that sure, it gives
the a copyright in that one note, or that one
word, and that's it! But I'm neither a lawyer
nor a judge, and that's where law gets made.
And to take it to the ridiculous, there's the guy
who "rediscovered" the measures in Gershwin's
"Rhapsody in Blue" that Gershwin himself had
excised, thus giving to the world the "original"
version which Gershwin obviously considered in
need of trimming, and so conveniently did so just
in the nick of time to claim a new copyright
before the original ran out!
Anyway, the observation was merely a caveat to
my main point which was going in the opposite
direction. I think we agree on that.
We do indeed.
John
P.S. Can anyone familiar with European law
answer one question? Given that there is a
recognized graphic copyright on page layout, can
it possibly last longer than the underlying
copyright on the contents of those pages? That
seems to be what the UE claims are all about, at
least in some cases.
--
John R. Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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