At 2:38 PM -0400 7/11/10, dhbailey wrote:
David W. Fenton wrote:
It's really crucial to maintain the distinction between the two,
seems to me, and getting all bent out of shape about the idiots
going after the Girl Scouts (ASCAP will surely lose in court if EFF
or somebody else steps up to defend the Girl Scouts) clouds the
issue of copyright and downloadable scores.
No, they're not different from Copyright. Performance is one of the
rights which is protected under the U.S. Copyright Act.
In this case you're both right. Performance rights are indeed part
of copyright, and would not exist otherwise. In fact they did NOT
exist prior to the 1909 revision of the law, and were considerably
tightened up in the 1976 revision. And it's performance rights that
ASCAP (and BMI and SESAC) are concerned with.
But each of the bundled rights is ADMINISTERED differently, and
performance rights are not administered by the government or by a
governmental commission, but by one of those several voluntary
membership organizations. So in that sense they are quite different.
But if you'll refer back to the Subject line, we're talking about
downloaded music (or more specifically downloadable), in this case
meaning the marks on paper (if I remember rightly), and that IS quite
different from performance rights. (Today's young infringers would
automatically assume that "downloaded music" means recordings, not
written music. The law and the way it's interpreted sometimes
observes that distinction and sometimes does not.)
John
--
John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music
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:john.how...@vt.edu)
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
"We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's definition
of jazz musicians.
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