I have been playing/learning a while from O'Neill's revised edition mainly because I enjoy the challenge of adding in all the ornamentation that he added in the revised. The revised edition is what is known as a copyrighted derivative/arrangement of exising public domain music. To the extent the arrangement was "creative" the copyright is valid.
I heard a version of Scatter The Mud done by Eileen Ivers that was exactly the same as that copyrighted in O'Neills. I define exactly as meaning it sounded just like the dots looked in Krassen's O'Neill's. Now, knowing that her playing is not going to be robotic enough to exactly duplicate the note time values in
the notation does that mean that she was not infringing?
If she left out a note in a roll but still was playing "essentially" the Krassen version was she infringing?
If she transposed it into the key of Eb would that be copyright free?
A Beatles tune no matter how contorted but still recognizable will for the next 100 years be copyright protected.
Scatter the Mud started out as a public domain great Jig but now is copyrighted for the next 100 years if played precisely as indicated in Krassen's O'Neil's.
My main question is: how imprecisely do you have to play these public domain jigs and reels to avoid copyright infringing Krassen's derivative interpretation/arrangement of over a thousand jigs, reels, and hornpipes?
I want to know how a guy like Cpt O'neill put his own copyright onto thousands of public domain tunes just by adding ornamentation. Every player in the world adds ornamentation to tunes, it doesn't mean that that tune, with that ornamentation is their copyright...
O'Neill didn't, as far as I know. And I doubt that he intended anything more that preservation and dissemination of the tunes he collected. (Whether he didi a good job is another question, but I believe his motives were good.)
Krassen is of another era entirely. He would never have got his stuff published had he not allowed (probably) the publisher to hold copyright. I don't know the answer to Felix's original question, either. However I wouldn't be so sure that the publisher (Oak was the original publisher, don't know if they still are) would have any intention of pursuing any performer for fees on this stuff. I suspect they are much more interested in protecting themselves against unauthorised reprinting of these versions. If they held no copyright, then anybody could start selling facsimiles of the entire book, which Krassen took the time to compile and edit, and Oak went to the expense of typesetting and printing.
This is just another example of trying to squeeze something onto this music that was developed for something entirely different. Just like writing it down in dot form, or even playing it in a well tempered scale. It's all a compromise and to quibble over the details ignores this. But, luckily, none of it really matters, shrug it off. We are far far too much of a niche market for anyone to get bothered about us
Michaels got the top and bottom of it; copyright has zero effect until you start making money, at which point someone will be round for their cut.
It's not in their interest to stop you using the stuff, after all you do all the work and when the money roles in, they get a cut.
The copyright will probably only be invoked if you publish a printed copy of parts of the book as your own.
Peter Kennedy describes such plagiarisms in his introductions to the republication of his "Traditional Dance Music of Britain and Ireland" in 1997: "...one case involving wholesale photocopying [of his 1950s books] to raise a publisher's collection to a total of 1,000 dance tunes."
With that said, a tune, or any piece of copyrighted material, needs to be altered by 15-20% to be considered "not infringing." This is the way we do it in the bobbin-lace world, and how I've heard it described for music. An alteration of fully a fifth of the original work makes the work substantively different.
Again, I am not a lawyer! (just somebody that gets all riled up about copyright law as some of it is SO DAFT!!!!)
I reckon if you give the credit of acknowledgeing where you found a tune, if you make a recording of it, the publishers would probably be quite grateful to you just for that, but they might want their little percentage off the top too.
Also, if you are filling in a sheet of music played after a gig ( see earlier post ) giving as much credit as possible to small, underheard, composers denies the big guys like Dylan, McCartney, M.Jackson, etc., percentages they would otherwise get because the mechanical copywright process is very lazy, and without being reminded by the returns who actually writes a lot of the stuff, they'll just give it to the big names; the year "Country Gardens" was top of the British hit parade the English Folk Dance and Song Society received a total of £200 for all traditional copywrghted material played anywhere in the British Isles. That's because people didn't fill in their performers returns.
I was just joking about the Beezlybubba remark. I think that Miles Krassen put in a lot of hours making an extremely - at least to me - useful book. I just don't think that it should be protected any longer than a good patent - 20 years. Maybe I should check his sources before I say that.
There are lot of creative folk musicians that need the income generaged by a good copyright. However, their great, great grandkids probably will be sunsailing figure eights around Io and Ganymede and won't give a Kleutu's wink about ITW. So why should they get a piece?
I apologize about getting the acronym wrong. In the year 2170 after Miles Krassen has been greatly missed for 40 or so years, and his O'Neill's copyright is still valid, a planet wide solar flare induced mutation suddenly prevents peoples lips from touching when they speak.
In almost all the copyright related threads, someone states that copyright doesn't enter into it unless you make money, and that the copyright holder simply needs to get a cut of that income to keep them happy.
This is not true. The copyright holder will lose income if less people buy their work. making the copyrighted material available for free or at a lower price robs the holder of potential sales. Also, overplaying the material lowers the value, playing it badly adds a negative association, etc. So the copyright holder may decide who can perform it, how it should be performed and how often. Not making money with it does not make it legal.
Except that the problem with this rather draconian stance, Shrog, is it just doesn't hold true of diddley music. OK if you are a dreary singer songwriter and you feel you must protect your "heart on your sleeve" work from ruining influences of degrading pop copies.
But we are talking about little diddley tunes here. Lets be honest about it, 16/32 bars of turns and repeats that undoubtedly resemble a billion other 16/32 bars of turns and repeats. No one denies that you have to be an expert in diddley to be able to tell these tunes apart, let alone appreciate them. So stop building them up to something they aint.
And, "playing it badly adds a negative association" ?? Yes, for Joe Punter of course, but for christ sake, if YOU really believed this about diddley music, you'd run a mile from the vast majority of sessions
Hey, I'm not pro any of this copyrighting diddly music rubbish, but the copyright law is the same no matter what style of music you're copyrighting. I was speaking in general terms of the law. Court cases are won every day by copyright holders solely on the points I have mentioned, so if you really want to be legal, then using the excuse of not making money is not going to protect you.
Personally, I totally and utterly ignore any copyrights on this music when I play it.
Actually I'm wrong there. Playing it badly does not add a negative assosiation for Joe Punter. Because not only can Joe not tell the tunes apart, he can not tell the good from the bad.
And despite Joe, this is the music we pay and love. We have made our bed with this exclusivity and we must lie in its clique.
And shrog want's to make it even more exclusive by copywriting it?
I did some title searches in ASCAP and BMI's websites, and I found that a lot of common titles are "copyrighted" by artists whose names you'd certainly recognize, and many of these artists hold "copyrights" to the same tunes...
So I assume that that means that the tunes are on recordings that are under copyright.
Any "copyright" rights are only enforceable under civil suit, so that means that there has to be A) enough money to begin to sue someone, and B) that the person being sued has to have enough money to be won. Attorneys will rarely sue someone who has no money at all, and folks with no money can't hire lawyers to sue.
So the issue of copyright is pretty much a non-issue until there is something to be gained by it. Of course, an established artist (with money) can sue to get someone to stop doing something in order to protect current and future earnings, but that also presumes (or a lawyer will) that that practice can be proven (in court) to actually have a demonstrable effect on the plaintiff's earnings or reputation.
A pretty high 'bar' for litigation, or even negotiations...
At least in the U.S., every creative work is copyrighted upon creation. When people talk about "copyrighting" a work, what they really mean is registering the copyright with the US Registrar of Copyrights. Registration gives the creator the right to sue to enforce the copyright, but the copyright exists before registration.
The principal value of copyright for our beloved "diddley" music is to avoid unauthorized copying and republishing. If you copied O'Neill's on a photocopier and sold it at your local music store with a new cover you could be sued. It would be foolhardy for someone to put a creative work out into the public without paying the $20 to the copyright office to register the copyright.
Re someone above who said that putting something up a 5th could get round copyright, it wouldn't!
There's a famous case where a photographer published a photo of three or four people in a street. Believe it or not, he got sued for copyright infringment, not from the people he photographed or anything like that, but becase the composition of the figures in the photo was so similar to another famous photograph published a few years earlier, that the later one was considered "derivative".
Even if you do a pastiche of a piece of music, if it's similar enough that the intention is that your piece reminds people of the "real" one, that is considered a breach of copyright too.
Copyright question
Copyright question
I have been playing/learning a while from O'Neill's revised edition mainly because I enjoy the challenge of adding in all the ornamentation that he added in the revised. The revised edition is what is known as a copyrighted derivative/arrangement of exising public domain music. To the extent the arrangement was "creative" the copyright is valid.
I heard a version of Scatter The Mud done by Eileen Ivers that was exactly the same as that copyrighted in O'Neills. I define exactly as meaning it sounded just like the dots looked in Krassen's O'Neill's. Now, knowing that her playing is not going to be robotic enough to exactly duplicate the note time values in
the notation does that mean that she was not infringing?
If she left out a note in a roll but still was playing "essentially" the Krassen version was she infringing?
If she transposed it into the key of Eb would that be copyright free?
A Beatles tune no matter how contorted but still recognizable will for the next 100 years be copyright protected.
Scatter the Mud started out as a public domain great Jig but now is copyrighted for the next 100 years if played precisely as indicated in Krassen's O'Neil's.
My main question is: how imprecisely do you have to play these public domain jigs and reels to avoid copyright infringing Krassen's derivative interpretation/arrangement of over a thousand jigs, reels, and hornpipes?
# Posted on September 19th 2005 by Felix Nelson
Re: Copyright question
Pass
# Posted on September 19th 2005 by zookman2
Re: Copyright question
I want to know how a guy like Cpt O'neill put his own copyright onto thousands of public domain tunes just by adding ornamentation. Every player in the world adds ornamentation to tunes, it doesn't mean that that tune, with that ornamentation is their copyright...
# Posted on September 19th 2005 by kjay_bc_box
Re: Copyright question
kjay
O'Neill didn't, as far as I know. And I doubt that he intended anything more that preservation and dissemination of the tunes he collected. (Whether he didi a good job is another question, but I believe his motives were good.)
Krassen is of another era entirely. He would never have got his stuff published had he not allowed (probably) the publisher to hold copyright. I don't know the answer to Felix's original question, either. However I wouldn't be so sure that the publisher (Oak was the original publisher, don't know if they still are) would have any intention of pursuing any performer for fees on this stuff. I suspect they are much more interested in protecting themselves against unauthorised reprinting of these versions. If they held no copyright, then anybody could start selling facsimiles of the entire book, which Krassen took the time to compile and edit, and Oak went to the expense of typesetting and printing.
# Posted on September 19th 2005 by kris
Re: Copyright question
This is just another example of trying to squeeze something onto this music that was developed for something entirely different. Just like writing it down in dot form, or even playing it in a well tempered scale. It's all a compromise and to quibble over the details ignores this. But, luckily, none of it really matters, shrug it off. We are far far too much of a niche market for anyone to get bothered about us
# Posted on September 19th 2005 by llig leahcim
Re: Copyright question
Michaels got the top and bottom of it; copyright has zero effect until you start making money, at which point someone will be round for their cut.
It's not in their interest to stop you using the stuff, after all you do all the work and when the money roles in, they get a cut.
PP
# Posted on September 19th 2005 by Pied Piper
Re: Copyright question
The copyright will probably only be invoked if you publish a printed copy of parts of the book as your own.
Peter Kennedy describes such plagiarisms in his introductions to the republication of his "Traditional Dance Music of Britain and Ireland" in 1997: "...one case involving wholesale photocopying [of his 1950s books] to raise a publisher's collection to a total of 1,000 dance tunes."
# Posted on September 19th 2005 by LowProfile
Re: Copyright question
I am not a lawyer!
With that said, a tune, or any piece of copyrighted material, needs to be altered by 15-20% to be considered "not infringing." This is the way we do it in the bobbin-lace world, and how I've heard it described for music. An alteration of fully a fifth of the original work makes the work substantively different.
Again, I am not a lawyer! (just somebody that gets all riled up about copyright law as some of it is SO DAFT!!!!)
-P
# Posted on September 19th 2005 by Philem
Re: Copyright question
I reckon if you give the credit of acknowledgeing where you found a tune, if you make a recording of it, the publishers would probably be quite grateful to you just for that, but they might want their little percentage off the top too.
Also, if you are filling in a sheet of music played after a gig ( see earlier post ) giving as much credit as possible to small, underheard, composers denies the big guys like Dylan, McCartney, M.Jackson, etc., percentages they would otherwise get because the mechanical copywright process is very lazy, and without being reminded by the returns who actually writes a lot of the stuff, they'll just give it to the big names; the year "Country Gardens" was top of the British hit parade the English Folk Dance and Song Society received a total of £200 for all traditional copywrghted material played anywhere in the British Isles. That's because people didn't fill in their performers returns.
# Posted on September 19th 2005 by Guernsey Pete
Re: Copyright question
Freedom of Expression (R) : Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity (Hardcover) from Amazon
This whole copyright thing might just be the Mark of the Beast (R) that Revelations was talking about.. Something definitely worth further study.
Thanks your takes on it.
# Posted on September 20th 2005 by Felix Nelson
Re: Copyright question
"Freedom of Expression (R) : Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity (Hardcover) from Amazon"
or for free from here: http://www.kembrew.com/books/index.html
# Posted on September 20th 2005 by lochin
Re: Copyright question
I was just joking about the Beezlybubba remark. I think that Miles Krassen put in a lot of hours making an extremely - at least to me - useful book. I just don't think that it should be protected any longer than a good patent - 20 years. Maybe I should check his sources before I say that.
There are lot of creative folk musicians that need the income generaged by a good copyright. However, their great, great grandkids probably will be sunsailing figure eights around Io and Ganymede and won't give a Kleutu's wink about ITW. So why should they get a piece?
# Posted on September 20th 2005 by Felix Nelson
Re: Copyright question
I apologize about getting the acronym wrong. In the year 2170 after Miles Krassen has been greatly missed for 40 or so years, and his O'Neill's copyright is still valid, a planet wide solar flare induced mutation suddenly prevents peoples lips from touching when they speak.
Irish Traditional Wusik (ITW) is the result.
# Posted on September 20th 2005 by Felix Nelson
Re: Copyright question
In almost all the copyright related threads, someone states that copyright doesn't enter into it unless you make money, and that the copyright holder simply needs to get a cut of that income to keep them happy.
This is not true. The copyright holder will lose income if less people buy their work. making the copyrighted material available for free or at a lower price robs the holder of potential sales. Also, overplaying the material lowers the value, playing it badly adds a negative association, etc. So the copyright holder may decide who can perform it, how it should be performed and how often. Not making money with it does not make it legal.
# Posted on September 20th 2005 by Shrog
Re: Copyright question
Except that the problem with this rather draconian stance, Shrog, is it just doesn't hold true of diddley music. OK if you are a dreary singer songwriter and you feel you must protect your "heart on your sleeve" work from ruining influences of degrading pop copies.
But we are talking about little diddley tunes here. Lets be honest about it, 16/32 bars of turns and repeats that undoubtedly resemble a billion other 16/32 bars of turns and repeats. No one denies that you have to be an expert in diddley to be able to tell these tunes apart, let alone appreciate them. So stop building them up to something they aint.
And, "playing it badly adds a negative association" ?? Yes, for Joe Punter of course, but for christ sake, if YOU really believed this about diddley music, you'd run a mile from the vast majority of sessions
# Posted on September 20th 2005 by llig leahcim
Re: Copyright question
Hey, I'm not pro any of this copyrighting diddly music rubbish, but the copyright law is the same no matter what style of music you're copyrighting. I was speaking in general terms of the law. Court cases are won every day by copyright holders solely on the points I have mentioned, so if you really want to be legal, then using the excuse of not making money is not going to protect you.
Personally, I totally and utterly ignore any copyrights on this music when I play it.
# Posted on September 20th 2005 by Shrog
Re: Copyright question
Actually I'm wrong there. Playing it badly does not add a negative assosiation for Joe Punter. Because not only can Joe not tell the tunes apart, he can not tell the good from the bad.
And despite Joe, this is the music we pay and love. We have made our bed with this exclusivity and we must lie in its clique.
And shrog want's to make it even more exclusive by copywriting it?
# Posted on September 20th 2005 by llig leahcim
Re: Copyright question
Sorry Shrog, cross post there, I take it all back
# Posted on September 20th 2005 by llig leahcim
Re: Copyright question
I did some title searches in ASCAP and BMI's websites, and I found that a lot of common titles are "copyrighted" by artists whose names you'd certainly recognize, and many of these artists hold "copyrights" to the same tunes...
So I assume that that means that the tunes are on recordings that are under copyright.
Any "copyright" rights are only enforceable under civil suit, so that means that there has to be A) enough money to begin to sue someone, and B) that the person being sued has to have enough money to be won. Attorneys will rarely sue someone who has no money at all, and folks with no money can't hire lawyers to sue.
So the issue of copyright is pretty much a non-issue until there is something to be gained by it. Of course, an established artist (with money) can sue to get someone to stop doing something in order to protect current and future earnings, but that also presumes (or a lawyer will) that that practice can be proven (in court) to actually have a demonstrable effect on the plaintiff's earnings or reputation.
A pretty high 'bar' for litigation, or even negotiations...
So... it doesn't matter much, I think. Unless...
stv
http://cdbaby.com/Culchies
# Posted on September 20th 2005 by stv culchie
Re: Copyright question
At least in the U.S., every creative work is copyrighted upon creation. When people talk about "copyrighting" a work, what they really mean is registering the copyright with the US Registrar of Copyrights. Registration gives the creator the right to sue to enforce the copyright, but the copyright exists before registration.
The principal value of copyright for our beloved "diddley" music is to avoid unauthorized copying and republishing. If you copied O'Neill's on a photocopier and sold it at your local music store with a new cover you could be sued. It would be foolhardy for someone to put a creative work out into the public without paying the $20 to the copyright office to register the copyright.
# Posted on September 22nd 2005 by markwilson
Re: Copyright question
Re someone above who said that putting something up a 5th could get round copyright, it wouldn't!
There's a famous case where a photographer published a photo of three or four people in a street. Believe it or not, he got sued for copyright infringment, not from the people he photographed or anything like that, but becase the composition of the figures in the photo was so similar to another famous photograph published a few years earlier, that the later one was considered "derivative".
Even if you do a pastiche of a piece of music, if it's similar enough that the intention is that your piece reminds people of the "real" one, that is considered a breach of copyright too.
Bonkers!
# Posted on September 25th 2005 by Mark Harmer