Making a ringtone from a recorded version of a fight song?

I work at a large midwestern university. We received a query from someone at a company that makes and markets ringtones for cell phones. They requested a recorded copy of our fight song to help them make the ringtone.  Not knowing much about electronic music, I assumed that what they would do is take sheet music and key the notes in to convert it to a MIDI. I contacted a friend who has a PhD in music and who "composed" one of the bleats that a Palm model emits at times. He tells me that there is software that will take a recorded performance of a song and convert it to a polyphonic MIDI file. He said this is analogous to OCR, and it works well for fairly simple tunes, such as fight songs.  Our university's fight song is in the public domain due to its age, but various recorded performances of it presumably are protected, just as an orchestra's recent commercial recording of Beethoven's Fifth would be. So, hypothetically, if someone took a protected recording and used software to translate that into a MIDI, have they potentially violated copyright?  I'm not sure you could even determine that the MIDI was made from the recorded orchestral work, but, just theoretically, would it be possibly be an infringement to do so without permission? I'm asking this as an academic question, not for legal advice.
 /rich Received on Tue Nov 15 2005 - 03:45:01 GMT