Copyright

On 12/17/2005 at 11:17 PM ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk wrote: Well, the copyright on sheet music has been broken for years and no move has been made to fix it. I'll tick off three of the more interesting aspects (there are more): * You buy a piece of sheet music--can you perform it in a concert? Maybe, maybe not--if you charge admission (even incidentally) to the performance, you will probably be required to obtain a separate license for performance rights. Same goes for broadcasting it over the radio. * How about making a recording and passing it out (free of charge) to friends and associates? Nope--that falls under "mechanical rights" and many publishers insist that a separate license be negotiated (this one dates from the days of player pianos and crank-up phonographs). * If a work in the public domain is republished with trivial changes (for example, a part for horn in F is transposed to horn in Eb), the resulting work enjoys the same rights as if it were a completely new work. (This can be a "gotcha" for arrangers and performers). We've seemingly acquiesced to DRM on Microsoft products (although I plan to continue using Win 2000 and Word 2000 for as long as I can); is there any reason to expect that restrictions and rights management won't become more restrictive? FWIW, there is a bit of hope on the horizon--web-based software. For example, have a look at http://www.writely.com - a very decent web-based word processing package. Cheers, Chuck