Copyright -- was PC-DOS 3.3

On 12/12/2005 at 7:25 PM woodelf wrote: Well, if you used as your model Rodin's circa-1900 piece "The Thinker", you're probably on safe ground as the work is in the public domain. However, if you used as your pattern someone's 1980 interpretation of Rodin's work, you'd likely be infringing. Most of my dealing with copyright is in printed music, and it's a minefield controlled by not very many large multinational firms. Suppose I wanted to produce an arrangement of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" for kazoo sextet. First, I'd research the work and discover that it was published in 1924, which puts it just past the magic October 1923 non-extension date for public domain works. So, it's still under copyright. I could wait until 2019 for the copyright to expire and hope that Congress didn't pass another extension(extremely unlikely), but I suspect my enthusiasm for the project will have waned by then. On the other hand, I could move to one of the EU countries and wait until 2007, when the copyright on the work would expire there. But I couldn't publish my arrangement in the USA without permission until 2019. So, I decide that I still want to write my arrangement and remain here in cold soggy Oregon. I locate the copyright owner, which (fortunately) is still the Gershwin trust, whose rights to the work are (unfortunately) administered by Hal Leonard/Warner Brothers, which is a division of Disney (some of the most difficult people you can imagine dealing with). I describe what I want to do, and await terms. Most likely, I'll end up paying a one-time fee of less than $1,000 to Disney, given the limited scope of my audience. That is, if they agree to allow me to do it--they're under no legal obligation and may in fact, not like the idea of six kazoos playing George's magnum opus. They will ask me if I've done any sketches or preliminary versions of the arrangement; if I say that I have, they may direct me to send them what I've got, destroy any copies or notes that I've made and never darken their door again. You see, the law says that doing an arrangement without permission is an infringement, even if it's unpublished. (Trust me--it's happened to folks I know). I'm still not home free. I must now find a copy of Rhapsody in Blue that's a facsimile of the original, not someone's edition. You see--corrections or alterations are also protected by copyright and I won't want to pay TWO people licensing fees. Then I can actually do what I want and go through with getting it published and sold. I hope it's a hit. There is yet another twist of copyright law that accompanies the fall of the old Soviet Union. Works that once were public domain in the USA because Warsaw Pact copyrights weren't recognized can be in the same class as "toothpaste back into the tube"--that is, they can have their copyrights "restored". This can lead to some interesting side effects. For example, orchestral musicians often use summaries of instrumental parts called "excerpts' as reference material (after all, who wants to wade through the whole score of Dvorak's New World Symphony just to know that there are only 13 notes played by the tuba?). Many of these that were quite legal prior to 1990 (e.g. the works of Dimitri Shostakovich) are now on the "restored" list and no longer published. Used copies of these now fetch several times their original price. At least Congress didn't mandate that we had to burn the old copies. Cheers, Chuck