On 1/28/99, Timothy Phillips <hrothgar[_at_]telepath.com> wrote:
>
> The following correspondence, from The Times (London), March, 1908,
> is offered for the amusement and edification of, and comment by,
> members of the list. I regret that it is rather long, but all
> nine letters are necessary to get the whole picture.
[bandwidth conserved]
I can't help on the historical question on German copyright law, but as to the economics etc. of contemporary music performance I can shed a bit of light (with many thanks to Tim Phillips for posting that fascinating bit of correspondence).
Most publishers happily grant permission to reprint in connection with a musical setting for free or for nominal fees. There are some authors, estates and publishers that are every bit the stinkers that C&W were in 1908. I am given to understand that the Robert Frost estate refuses to permit anyone to set Frost poems *unless they approve the music.* -- a condition no self-respecting composer would accept (myself included, so my own Frost settings just stay buried in drawers). For other contemporary-poetry settings I have gotten permission directly from the poet (who either retains derivative rights licensing capability or can easily prevail on a publisher to grant it), thus performing an end-run around such "public spirited" enterprises as Chatto & Windus.
As a legal matter, though I grudgingly admit that setting and performing a poetical setting as music could be a violation of copyright in the original (though for a poem only ever published in a collection, I wonder if the substantiality test is met), quaere whether there is any market effect at all on the owner, since the owner has no access to the music and is unlikely to offer a competing setting. Moreover, if the publisher has been granted only first (or even exclusive) publishing rights for a collection of poems, what business has it to grant rights to set one of them?
Most music concerts (concert-music concerts, that is, excepting opera) in the US that perform music likely to have in-copyright texts do not sell programs, and it is always considered good form to reprint the texts. I have, curiously, recently been to a concert at which the texts were given out free (the texts were PD) but the program notes were separately printed and charged for (three bucks; no thanks).
As chairman of a new-music ensemble, I am responsible for getting concert programs written and printed, so I can safely estimate that the cost of doing this for about 250 printed programs is in the vicinity of $125 for a 16-pager, assuming the typesetting is done in-house and all that costs is the printing on plain paper (colored cover), folding, stapling, etc. If one has to purchase program notes, that might run another $100 per article. All against not one cent of revenue, and ticket sales seldom cover even the hall rental. We long ago gave up soliciting advertising in our programs, but someone with enough enterprise and shoeleather could probably raise enough to pay for the program's production costs (though note that most advertising is sold on a subscription basis, so that one would have to raise enough in one sales effort to cover the costs of all programs printed for the series).
Hope this furthers Tim's inquiry.
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