I'm not a lawyer, but my work involves intellectual property issues. The law should be clear but in practice it isn't. In the US it as follows:
The copyright law of the United States provides for copyright protection in musical works, including any accompanying words, that are fixed in some tangible medium of expression. 17 U.S.C. § 102(a)(2). Musical works include both original compositions and original arrangements or other new versions of earlier compositions to which new copyrightable authorship has been added. The owner of copyright in a work has the exclusive right to make copies, to prepare derivative works, to sell or distribute copies, and to perform the work publicly. Anyone else wishing to use the work in these ways must have the permission of the author or someone who has derived rights through the author. note: Copyright in a musical work includes the right to make and distribute the first sound recording. Although others are permitted to make subsequent sound recordings, they must compensate the copyright owner of the musical work under the compulsory licensing provision of the law. The key issue is that the copyrighted work must be fixed in some medium of expression. You can claim copyright on your arrangement, and if it is sufficiently original (and that's tough to tie down) you'll be able to defend it. You can claim a right to your collection, i.e. the printed work but not the actual tunes, and you have rights to a recorded performance. You may **claim** right to the underlying work, but you don't legally have any and you'll have a tough time defending it. To Barry's point, even a though a claim is questionable, money will often win out in the courts. -----Original Message----- From: Barry Say [mailto:barr...@nspipes.co.uk] Sent: Friday, January 16, 2009 10:42 AM To: nSP LIST Subject: [NSP] Re: Copyright issues Richard isnt wrong about recording giving copyright, I wasn't sufficiently clear. What I meant was that when, for instance, the Carter Family learned a song from and old-timer and and then performed it in a recording studio for commercial release, they could claim the copyright on the original song. If I may quote from an essay in the 'Old-time String Band Song Book by John Cohen, 1964. (Oak publications USA) - probably infringing copyright as I do so. ------------------------------- In the past few years, while folk music has become a national fad and an industry, some scholarship has been used and abused for other purposes. Academic folklorists have often found it necessary, or feasible to copyright songs they have collected. Many recent songwriters have rearranged the old songs and carefully researched them to establish them in the public domain. Once they have shown that, they can claim the compositions as there own with little fear of counter-claims. This is the saddest part of the situation: it has reached the point where everyone feels obliged to copyright something before someone else does it, even though though the claim may be questionable in the first place. Fear begets fear money, begets only money and the question of morality is left behind. ---------------------------------- He is the referring mainly to song and the law may have changed since then of course, but I always bear this in mind when discussing copyright. Barry On 16 Jan 2009 at 9:36, Richard York wrote: > Hi, > Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm sure simply recording it does confer > > copyright, or at least has in the past, justly or not. > When various people collected folk singers earlier in the C20th, I > believe it's still an issue which rankles that by doing so they did > exactly that. > I was told that there's one huge collection of traditional material > which apparently at least recently had exactly this issue, & probably > still does; sorry, I can't remember for sure which so won't name any. > Old ladies & gents innocently sang their songs into the nice > gentleman's microphone, only to find that he now owned their songs. > > I think Barry, that it goes on for 75 yrs after the owner's death - > certainly does in the case of composers. > > The EFDSS library would supply more details. > Best wishes, > Richard. > > To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
