Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum A gentle reminder to all our newbies - when "sharing" is a euphemism for stealing

I know this topic has been discussed before both here and on the teacher's forum, but a lot of newbies have joined us lately so it bears repeating.

If you copy and distribute to other people sheet music that is under copyright and hasn't been made freely available for download by the copyright holder, you're stealing from the publisher and the composer. I want music publishers to stay in business and I respect the right of composers to be paid for their work, so I don't do this. Imagine how you'd feel if one day your pay check, or scholarship, or allowance, whatever you get, was less than you expected and you were told there was nothing you could do about it because other people had been copying your work and not paying for it. You'd be pretty mad, right?

Thank you for the reminder, Donna. I don't have to imagine it. As a freelance translator I have two issues of non-payment currently, in which entities in foreign countries commissioned translations and have not paid. That means my work is being used by someone somewhere with no recompense on my side. Believe me, it does not feel good.

Just a quick question (something which has probably been asked before sometime):

What happens if someone has figured out the notes to a piece of music? The piece of music in question does not have sheet music printed in a copyright form.

Is it illegal to share the transcription with other people?

Hi Euan,

This is an interesting question. I think if you figure out the notes yourself, especially to a piece that hasn't been published, you would have a right to share it because it's unlikely that your transcription would be an exact facsimile of the original piece - it would be your interpretation of it. But someone else may want to correct me on this - any copyright lawyers among us?

As a rule will the copyright be help by the composers descendants (assuming they are dead)

Are there any composers who's works have free distribution rights or certain rights only apllicable to education?

I'm no IP attorney but..

I think this is a gray area.

If you published the (transcribed) head of a tune, you are probably infringing on the tune's copyright. Many many tunes were never published in paper form before being transcribed, so all we have are transcriptions of them (fakebooks). It's not legal to publish and these were bootlegs for a long time. Even though they are the transcriber's interpretation to a large extent, and everyone knows they're wrong anyway :p


If you transcribe a solo and publish it, it's more shady. Some will argue that improvisation is written composition. To that extent, it's all copyrighted and you have no right to duplicate it.

Now if you transcribe 4 bars of so-and-so playing scales and arpeggios over xyz tune, it can't really be protected because that stuff has been played tons of times.

In the end, I don't think anyone will go after you if you publish your own transcriptions of a solo.

I'm no copyright lawyer, Donna, but my understanding of the law is that the creative work and its derivatives (i.e., any adaptation or arrangement) are protected by law (in the U.S.; I have no idea what's legal or not in other countries). What I think this means is that it's perfectly legal for somebody to play something by ear in the privacy of their own home and make their own transcription for personal use, but you could not publish or share that transcription with anybody else.

Jamie, many composers (especially those starting out) will give out free copies of their sheet music. On David Nevue's "Whisperings" internet radio station website, for example, he has a link to sheet music by the composers whose music he plays. Much of it is for sale, but there are some free sheets listed too. It's up to the composer.

Again, I have no idea what you are able to do in the UK. My sense is that copyright law is more stringent here in the states.

Jamie, I think this thread copying sheet music has the answers to your questions.

Then of course you have the reality that nearly every song in western music is based on something whose copyright has expired.

Wikipedia has a very interesting entry on this.

POPULAR SONGS BASED ON CLASSICAL MUSIC

You get into all kinds of gray areas with musical borrowing, parody, rappers borrowing short "quote-like" portions or "sequences" of copyrighted music under "Fair Use" etc. etc.

You tell me. IS IT COOLIO OR PACHELBEL?

Or this:

VILLAGE PEOPLE? PET SHOP BOYS? PACHELBEL?

Excuse me, I'm gonna go do some aerobic housework now.

As others here have opened their comments with, I am not a lawyer. However, we can point to certain factual accounts that are a matter of historical record.

With regard to the OP's original comment, I agree and would say that it is best to err on the conservative side and NOT distribute anything that could be questionable. The rest of this is just some observations on the subject based on American cultural history of the past 100 years or so (except for "What Child Is This", which I am not sure when or where that came about).

Melodies can be copyrighted, but not chord progressions. Jazz musicians often would create their own tunes based on common chord progressions, in particular the "Rhythm Changes", based on the Gershwin tune "I Got Rhythm", which is the ever-popular iii vi ii V I progression.

It is not at all uncommon for the chord progression for an entire popular tune to be "lifted" and used for a completely different tune. A lot of jazz tunes can be directly traced to popular tunes of their day. This practice goes far beyond lifting a chordal phrase such as ii V I and using it in other tunes. As far as I know, nobody ever got into trouble for doing this. This practice has been so common that there is a term for it, but I can't remember what it is offhand.

In mainstream music, there are cases of one tune, complete with chords AND melody being lifted and used for another. The original tune in two cases I can name offhand was originally in "public domain", so there was no problem anyway:

Greensleeves/What Child Is This (traditional)
Aura Lee/Love Me Tender (Elvis)

When looked at from this perspective, there is less completely ORIGINAL music floating around than one might think. But, then, people tend to like what they know (you learn that pretty quickly in a working band if you want to eat...). Most songs that are well received by the general public sound pretty much like what they have already heard. By using common chord progressions, this similarity is maintained. If a tune is too different, there is a very good chance that it will not go anywhere. Music evolves (i.e. borrows heavily from what came before, while adding its own little twist to that), but it is not that often that it takes a completely different twist and makes any kind of headway in mainstream culture.

As for the question about whether a person can distribute their own version of a tune they figured out off the recording, I don't think so. Here is my reasoning...there have been quite a number of sites on the net that feature guitar tablature representations of songs that people have figured out off recordings. These are usually rock and pop tunes. Record and music publishing companies have gone after and shut down some of these sites. In most cases, the tablature was not even a very good representation of the original song, but because it was touted as being a particular song, it was transgressing copyright anyway. The quality of such transcriptions provided freely on the internet varies widely, yet that does not seem to matter in legal terms.

TonyB

That thread you linked to is very useful, Donna. I personally loved Kreisler's line in it: "Photocopying to avoid purchase is wrong." I'd extend it to "downloading transcriptions" as well. If a legal version of the sheet music is available, you should buy it.

What is a grey area for me is the ethics of transcriptions for pieces where no official sheet music exists. The law is clear... such unofficial transcriptions are also illegal (in the U.S.). But I can certainly understand the temptation to use them if no other form of the sheet music exists.

Tony, a longstanding English tradition attributes Greensleeves to Henry VIII. I shudder to think what the penalty would have been for violating his copyright!

In my original post I was thinking mostly of the solo sheets and collections I buy by contemporary composers - people who write music to help piano students advance their skills and give them more interesting music to play than is found in most method books. But copyright law is a complex and murky area, that's for sure.

Monica K:

While I understand and fundamentally agree with your post about unoffical transcriptions in the absence of other forms of published sheet music, I think there is historical precedent for that too.

Some time ago (early 70s?) the first of the "Real Book" series came about. These were fakebooks that consisted of transcriptions of jazz recordings in fakebook format (i.e. melody with chords written above it) made by students at the Berklee College of Music as class assignments. The professor put these together in book format and made them available to jazz musicians. These books were considered illegal, and even today you have to "know somebody" or buy them under the counter at certain music stores (though there are people offering them as PDF files on the internet now too).

At the bottom of most pages in the Real Books, the original recording from which the tune was lifted is given, so at least people can go back and hear what it sounded like. These tunes are most often jazz performances of the tune, rather than the original vocal version that most people might be familiar with. since these were done by students for transcriptions for classes, it does make sense why the contents are as they are in these books.

Urban legend has it that the professor did jail time, but I don't know this to be factual. I do know these books ARE still considered illegal because none of the copyright formalities for publishing the tunes contained in the books were ever attended to.

In recent years, Hal Leonard has begun publishing legal versions of these books, though the tune selection is somewhat different.

Also, the "real" Real Books were notorious for incorrect chords. But, because they were the only game in town for so long, the "Real Book changes" became the defacto standard chords used for those tunes anyway. The Hal Leonard books contain the corrected changes, so it will be interesting to see if the "real" Real Book changes persist in spite of the availability of the correct changes now.

TonyB

Did you know that if you do the harmonic progression for Pachelbel's Canon in reverse you get Jim Croce's "Bad Bad Leroy Brown?"

In many ways, school is more fun than trucking.



I always felt that teaching sightreading music is a lot like teaching typing or dictation.

One way to get around all this is to go back to the Common Era and just make them into little Bachs -- 1/3 performance, 1/3 composition and 1/3 improvisation.

Donna:

You said:

In my original post I was thinking mostly of the solo sheets and collections I buy by contemporary composers - people who write music to help piano students advance their skills and give them more interesting music to play than is found in most method books.


My response:

To me, that would be a very clear copyright violation, since those books will have clear copyright statements in them protecting the contents.

I suspect that most of us don't think of the legalities, but instead we are focused on doing somebody a favor. Because of that, your reminder is really important and timely. When copies were made locally (i.e. a teacher gave a copy of one page from some book to a student or a friend copied one page from some songbook for another friend), it was controlled and nobody really bothered with such limited distribution. But once something like that is on the internet, it is all over the world instantly, and there is real trouble.

As an aside...

When I played in church bands, the churches usually paid an annual fee for the right to copy printed materials to distribute to the band or choir. However, just because the materials were formally published and copyrighted, that was no guarantee that they were correct. Yet, correctness didn't matter - copyright did. I remember a couple of rock-style tunes for which we were given copies of the published sheet music AND the recording on tape to prepare for the next practice. Being a guitar player, it seemed perfectly natural to me to figure out the tune off the recording. I came to practice with the corrected chords and we gave them to everybody. I hope we were covered by that same fee.

TonyB

Donna, think of your favorite song then go to youtube and search it. When it comes up, hit play.

And I thought Napster was a free-for-all!

Dead composers spend no royalties.

I would be happy to pay for sheet music if I knew it was going to relatives or a museum but if the cheque was made payable to FatCats Holding Corp I would be inclined procure it by other means.

FatCats Holding Corp. has the $$ backing to enforce its copyrights. Disney and Warner Brothers have the best-known enforcement arms.

Hi Mr. SH!

I hope you've been enjoying the fray. Didn't you say things had been too quiet around here lately? You should see my PM box!

YouTube is a closed book to me and I intend to keep it that way. I have from time to time pointed out that something people have been linking to there is actually under copyright, but I feel like a lone voice crying in the wilderness. It's a hard burden to bear in today's world, being one of those old-fashioned ethical types.