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Is a recording of a music box that plays a public domain classical melody copyrighted by the box manufacturer?3 comments to Is a recording of a music box that plays a public domain classical melody copyrighted by the box manufacturer?You must be logged in to post a comment. |
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No, the clip of the music is very short on a music box anyway and short clips from a performance can generally be re-used, and it isn’t being ‘performed’ in the normal sense anyway. The music is in the public domain. You should be OK on that one.
This can be tricky: While the music itself is in the public domain, the performance might not be. For example, if you were to record the Philadelphia Philharmonic Orchestra performing, say, Beethoven, and tried to sell copies of the performance, there would be a copyright issue. However, if you entered Beethoven’s score into your musical composition software, and sold the recordings, there would be no problems. Exceptions are made for use of copyrighted material in the contexts of critiques and such, but there is a limit, and there may be restrictions on whether you can profit from it.
The performance of a music box is mechanical, and in any case the rights to performance are held solely by the music composer/publisher (usually through ASCAP or BMI), not the device programmer.
only a creative work of original authorship can be copyrighted. The programming of the device, whether mechanical as in punched player piano rolls, or software as midi instructions can be protected only from direct replication, the sounds produced when these programs run is not owned by the programmer.
this issue was resolved in 1909 when the copyright law was clarified to distinguish the rights held by music composers versus the rights held by the patents of mechanical phonographs. This was updated by law in 1972, which allowed that a recording of a performance involved creative action that could be protected by copyright in certain instances. However the reversed situation, a performance made from a recording (programmed device) is not so protected, being strictly mechanical in origin.