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And to me, when I have to pay a lot of money for a poor edition of music by a dead composer from a publisher with exclusive rights, that idea is not working...

Or maybe it is a lot of money because you are not working!

You have all the information you need to determine a fair price. You know how much good it will do and you know the asking price, that's all that matters.

That may work for you; it doesn't for me.

Well it doesn't just work for me, it seems to work for...well everybody. Or maybe everybody except yourself.

This entire discussion seems populated by people who have very exacting ideas about what others should or should not do with their own property.

The idea is the composer can get paid in advance...get paid more than if the publishing rights disappear with the composer's death.

... and this is how threads of this sort begin their death spiral.

But in truth, we are getting to that point where peoples' basic life philosophies begin to color their analysis in increasingly overt ways.

I think Brent H is on the right track when he says,



I would suggest that the thread has not "entirely" followed this pattern, and not everyone (waves hand vigorously) has taken the view that their notions of the social good should allow them to set pricing. But increasingly, the thread is moving in the direction of competing ethical norms.

This is an important point. If we are arguing about the optimal number of years, it's a fairly technical point of balancing the incentive to produce new work versus the consumer surplus from free (or very low cost) availability.

Of course the discussion is about what people think people should do with their "property". What else could a discussion about copyright laws be?

So, what did Durand pay Messiaen for Vinqt Regards? What did the publisher pay Jennifer Higden for the piano concerto premiered by Yuja Wang? What do the publishers pay the composers for new pieces commissioned for competitions?

Ummmm, perhaps .... incentives? The incentive to produce new work, for instance? That's not an ethical "should" question. It's a question of creating future value that benefits all. There is a tradeoff between the public's interest in having everything now, and for free, and the public's benefit from a system that encourages new creative work that benefits them and future generations.

The court only decides whether laws are being enforced correctly. In this case, the court has ruled that material which the law should have correctly considered protected was being mistakenly treated as "public domain". It's the same concept as a store mistakenly marking a $100.00 item with a $1.00 price tag. If they discover the error of course they change it to the correct $100.00, no?

As I understand it, the SCOTUS decided that under USA copyright law and the treaties to which US Government is party these works are due the same protection as other copyrighted works (life plus 70 years). So now that is the way the law will be interpreted henceforth.

And yes, somebody loses out. It's like you had gone into that store before and bought the $100 item for dollar, you go back and now it's a hundred bucks. You may not want or be able to afford it. And no, the non-retroactive enforcement of a poorly implemented treaty provision does not magically go back and bestow either money or incentives on long-dead composers. It is in that sense a windfall for holders of certain copyrights.

But in the view of the Supremes a broken system has now been repaired. So the intended incentives and so forth can flow in future. Grab your free/cheap scores now if you can.

That's just silly.

[See, I respond to "nonsense" with "silly." ]

The topic is broader than this particular little spat about Prokofiev. The public purpose of a policy change can be forward looking. Of course there are distributional issues. Holders of a right that is changed win or lose. But the ongoing issues are how we coordinate with international law, and how the whole apparatus of copyright protection does or does not give the right incentives to produce new work.

But you can also save time and travel and just make an illicit Xerox of the stuff you want. Ownership is just a bunch of lawyer talk anyway, right? Nothing stopping you from grabbing whatever your conscience will allow.

Ownership is just a bunch of lawyer talk anyway, right?