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Copyright protectionCopyright protectionPosted Aug 26, 2012 21:42 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)In reply to: Copyright protection by giraffedata Parent article: Mobile patent wars: Google goes on the attack Ah, now I understand: you mean something like a revised edition, not just a reprint. I thought we were talking about a copyright wherein a person couldn't legally read the notes off the page, type them into a music publishing program, and print new copies of the composition.That would indeed be quite bizarre. I think a new edition of an old music work can restrict e.g. photocopying the exact pages, but not protect the music score in any way. The same would be true for a text book. But I am not an expert in any way, just a puny armchair copyright amateur.
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Copyright protection Posted Aug 27, 2012 9:42 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] Music publishers bring out new editions of old works all the time. Usually they add stuff like fingering or dynamics that wasn't in the original, just so they have something obvious to copyright. This is on top of re-typesetting the music according to modern customs, since the original old scores are often quite difficult to make out even if you photograph them 1:1 for reproduction. Even »urtext« editions which try to present the music as originally written by, say, Bach or Beethoven normally add »critical« annotations along the lines of »In bar 39, the so-and-so edition of 1865 has an A where all the other editions have an A-flat«. If you were to locate a very old copy of the music in question in your granny's laundry chest, you would be perfectly free to scan these pages and put them up on the Internet, even if modern editions of the same music exist. You would also be perfectly free to take your laptop, with a music typesetting program on it, to your friendly neighbourhood music library and type in stuff from very old scores there. This is basically what the music publishers do, anyway.
Copyright protection Posted Aug 27, 2012 10:46 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Would you also be free to take your laptop with a music typesetting program and type in stuff from the modern edition? I assume that, as long as you don't copy the new annotations, you are good to go: the mere work of e.g. compiling the score from older sources is not copyrighteable.
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