I thank all for their ideas and for sharing them with generosity and
eloquence. I feel that some issues have not been addressed:-)
Surely "There should be free music" does not mean "Music should be
free"? Should sculpture? Should painting? No one who does anything
creative in music can agree with that;-).
What is going to be on this website? JSB Complete works would be nice.
No commercial publisher will download the complete works of JSB,
however, and rush it into print. Public domain music is comparatively
cheap. Over the coming years, almost all publishers of music books can
expect to go out of business, unless their publications be better
sellers than anything I have ever heard of. To elucidate, the sheet
music publisher pays the author or his agent a royalty of $0.035, (Yes,
3 1/2 cents, not even trinkgeld) for a 3 year old song. The publisher
has it printed, and the printer gets more than the songwriter-author.
Then the music is resold through a chain of jobbers and distributors,
the price almost doubling through each resale, until it ends up in a
rack in a music store priced at $3.50. Then some of it gets bought, and
some just takes up space. Publishers make far more money from
performance rights than from sheet music sales, and publishers are the
ones who make the big money, not authors:-(.
All sites that have attempted to sell downloadable books have failed
miserably, because people prefer the physical format of hard covers *for
ordinary books*. (The retail price of a regular book is, as a rule of
thumb, about 10 times its cost of production.) It remains to be seen
whether this preference will or will not apply to works of music. When I
buy music, one of the first things I do is photocopy as much as I must
to eliminate page turns. How much nicer to download music, print it, and
bind it accordion fold (Japanese style) with masking tape. (There used
to be a product called "music hinges" to do this, but that is gone
because the tape is cheaper and better.) So ordinary books must be
downloaded in an undesirable format, but *music for printing could be
downloaded in a desirable format*:-).
The downloader should owe the author a royalty for what he prints, but
the downloader is the publisher! Why should he owe anyone else anything?
For example, if the downloader prints, and resells to his students, (he
might well bind first, and there is no reason not to charge for that) he
owes a royalty to the author for each copy printed, but surely not to
all the other publishers! This creates a legal question because the
framers of the copyright laws did not envision a situation where the
publisher was also a consumer. In fact, I'm not sure that a copyright
even exists before publication! Therefore, although I cannot say that
this rises to the level of an opinion, humble or otherwise, I would
think that the Printers' Oath would be a more useful model for something
to consent to before a download than a software license or a copyleft,
and whatever permissions necessary could be on the title page. Of course
legal advice on all of this is absolutely essential.
Back to the public domain and free stuff...
Even urtexts are not completely ur. (This group urgently needs a
glossary. I should have known the term "linespace" since it is in my
native tongue, but I'll bet not many reading this know what a
"mechanical" is, nor should most of you, but everyone should know what
an urtext is.) Somebody has to read all that old stuff and figure out
what it is, even when there is no question of wrong notes, missing ties,
etc.. It is of great interest to the musician to know *who has done
this*, and I fail to see what would inspire a scholar to anything
whatever if 1) he did not get any recognition and 2) any clown could
supercede his work. Therefore, IMHO everything posted should be
annotated, and no sale of copies should be allowed without a title page,
which should contain the fine print: annotation, discussion of versions,
provenance, who's he?, copyright status, etc.. This information is not
dead weight. It has value. Also, if granted, permission to print free
copies of the music without the title page must be explicitly given
therein:-). I think that short pieces would probably be bundled anyway,
so a title page would not add much to the download time. Anyone
downloading must agree to print all of the title pages. Also, the title
page should be labeled *page 1* because a copyright notice, to be valid,
must be on the title page or on the first page of music. I hope that
there will be plenty of boilerplate for contributors to select and copy
so they don't have to write copylefts and that kind of stuff from
scratch. A selection of covers and backs would be kind of neat, too.
A mechanical is a paste-up. In the case of an entire music book, the
only difference would be thousands of dollars, and the probability that
the mechanicals would be held together with wax from a machine rather
than paste or a gluestick.
I'm sure that a German speaker could define urtext much better. besides,
I didn't use it first;-)
--
Peace, understanding, health and happiness to all beings!
((((((( g__n__u f_o_r_c_e )))))))
lily_lily__lily MN[-------------------->mm@ _lilypond__
dave No Va USA David Raleigh Arnold [EMAIL PROTECTED]
