Re: Copyright of Choreography, was: Re: Rights to music at sports events

On 5/2/97, John Kasdan <kasdan[_at_]columbia.edu> wrote:
>
> A few years back Eliot Feld prepared a ballet and only a few weeks before
> the scheduled premier he finally learned that he could _not_ get the
> performance rights to the music. What he did was to deliver a very
> funny monologue on the failed negotiations and then his company
> performed the piece without music. Obviously he thought that he was
> not breaking any laws thereby and the owner of the music copyright, as
> near as I know, did not sue on a "derivative work" theory.

This is somewhat similar to the situation of the song "Tarrant Moss" by Charles Ives, setting a poem by Rudyard Kipling. When Ives self-published his "114 Songs" in 1922 he hadn't received the requested permission from Kipling, so he published just the music, with only the first three words of the text (a pretty safe fair use, one would think).

If I may be permitted a little bit of topic drift here, I've often wondered, in the context of poetry that is only available in anthologies (that is, it may have once been published in a magazine by itself but cannot any longer be obtained as an individual unit), whether the 1976 Act's multipart fair use analysis wouldn't now permit the setting of a poem by a "classical" (therefore [?] not particularly commercial) composer as a fair use. The amount taken (compared to the anthology) is small, there wouldn't be any market displacement for the original, the use could well be said to be more educational than commercial. Under the bizarre logic of Texaco, I suppose one could say the unlicensed use deprives the copyright holder of the revenues from licensing, but is there any other factor weighing in favor of not-fair-use?

Vance R. Koven
<vrkoven[_at_]world.std.com> Received on Wed May 07 1997 - 13:01:08 GMT