Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2010 June 22

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June 22

Copyright on MIDI music.

Suppose there is a piece of music that's LONG out of copyright - something composed in 1800 let's say. If someone published a music score on paper then the score itself could still be copyrighted - and also a MIDI file that someone put together would also be copyrighted. But if someone wanted to perform the piece from the sheet music - their performance wouldn't be covered by the copyright on the score they happen to use...right? So what about a performance from the MIDI-file? Is a sound file made by a computer processing the MIDI file covered by copyright that the author of the MIDI file has or not?

If the answer is "yes" - the copyright on the MIDI data applies to the performance of it - then what if I use a score-editing program to turn a paper score into a MIDI-file?

SteveBaker (talk) 00:54, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

With the obvious caveat that I am not a lawyer, law student, or anything of the like, I'd expect that Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service would provide a useful example of a similar case. If you're taking the sheet music and transposing it exactly into a MIDI format, then you probably don't meet any standard of originality and thus the MIDI file wouldn't be subject to copyright. However, a live performance all but certainly would be sufficiently original, as a human performer isn't going to be playing the music with machinelike precision. Similarly, subtle alterations in the MIDI file (altering tempo, redefining one of the instruments, what have you) could probably constitute originality. This leaves aside any issues of the copyright on the sheet music itself, and under what conditions that sheet music has been licensed -- that's well beyond anything I know about. — Lomn 01:31, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Searching for info on this turns up mostly the issue of using someone else's MIDI file. This book, for example, say that according to the U.S. Copyright Office, a standard MIDI file is a work of authorship copyrightable as a sound recording. Whether one can use of the MIDI file to print out sheet music is another issue. This book suggests the question has not been resolved, but that some licenses specifically deny persmission to print the MIDI data as sheet music. From what I can tell in my quick search, the question of whether a performance of a copyrighted MIDI file is covered by the copyright is something unresolved in U.S. law (but don't take my word for it--I only did a quick search). Your question, "what if I use a score-editing program to turn a paper score into a MIDI-file?" is a different issue. I couldn't find a source with this info, but I'm skeptical there would be a problem. Music notation does not indicate exactly how the music is to be performed--especially older long out of copyright music. Sheet music terms like espressivo, ritardando, etc, as well as dynamic markings like pp, p, mf, f, ff, etc, are vague and relative. Much is left to performance interpretation with common notation symbols like slurs, grace notes, accents, etc. So creating a MIDI file from sheet music necessarily involves interpreation and some degree of creativity--even if rendered as mechanically as possible, that it still an interpretation and likely not at all what the composer intended! Further, if the music itself is long out of copyright it should usually be possible to find out of copyright sheet music as well. And in any case, how would anyone know you made the MIDI file using sheet music instead of, say, working it out by ear? Sorry I have no definitive answer--just very skeptical on that one. Pfly (talk) 09:21, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Now here is an interesting question and a somewhat counterintuitive possibility: If I have a copy of an 1815 score of the Eroica, then both the music and the score are out of copyright. If I do a completely automatic translation into MIDI, the MIDI score should be without copyright as well - or is it? The program I use to interpret musical choices certainly has tunable parameters (how loud is fortissimo, how fast is allegro). Is their choice a creative act? What if I later use the same settings for the Nutcracker suite? On the other hand, if I listen to a performance and work the MIDI out from their, I'm probably infringing on the performers copyright. But am I again adding creativity, i.e. do I also have a copyright interest in the MIDI? What if I use a program that samples the recording and creates a MIDI file from that? Creative commons sure looks attractive ;-) --Stephan Schulz (talk) 10:01, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

So you're all essentially saying that creativity is the issue here?

Whether the MIDI file (or the paper score) is copyrightable depends on creativity put into it? So if I merely photocopy an original hand-written score by Mozart, then I don't have copyright on the photocopy - but if I beautify the score, lay it out more neatly, remove the crossings-out, etc - then I have copyright on my copy of the score - even though the actual notes on the stave and the annotations around it are identical to Mozart's. The same must be true for MIDI. The question is about the nature of the performance from those (potentially copyrighted) scores/MIDI. I don't think a pianist who plays music from a paper score and sells recordings of that music has to pay licensing fees to the person who printed the score since none of the creative cleanup of Mozart's original work ended up in his recording...right? The musician owns copyright on the recording because he used considerable creativity in playing it.

But when my computer automatically replays the MIDI file does the resulting audio stream have:

• Copyright owned by the creator of the MIDI file - because in transcribing the Mozart score into MIDI, some measure of creativity is implied...just as it was with the paper score transcription.
• Copyright ownership by the person who caused the MIDI file to be played on the computer.
• No copyright at all since zero creativity was added to what Mozart originally wrote - and that's out of copyright now.

How the heck are people supposed to avoid legal issues when the law is such a fuzzy mess?!?

SteveBaker (talk) 11:08, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Well, to some extent they're not. The technology enabling novel manipulations in this and many other fields advances much more quickly than the pace at which legislators can be expected to envisage and legislate for all possible resultant scenarios; the latter are more the province of science fiction authors. Instead, novel legal precedents are often created by legal cases over specific issues - see Case law. Sometimes a glaring lack of law appropriate to an area of newly developed possibilities will prompt a special effort to analyse and recommend on it - the Warnock Report (1984) (shockingly, no article) springs to mind - otherwise, the uncertainties that understandably annoy many of us (some more than others depending on personality and philosophy) is the price we pay for a dynamic society and the rich variety of human possibilities. 87.81.230.195 (talk) 15:07, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

But if you create the midi file then you can release all your rights (if any). Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:26, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

The solution of course is to ask the legal department at the publisher, but I can save you some time: They will say, "There's no case law — there are risks — find another way." Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:26, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

A score published and copyrighted cannot be republished as a score; anything else you do with it is fine, so long as the music itself (as opposed to the score) isn't copyrighted. An arrangement is different; a MIDI file or anything else that duplicated a copyrighted arrangement would be in violation of copyright, if without permission. The MIDI file created from a score would be copyrightable, in and of itself, if it were performed and recorded, meaning republication of the recorded performance would be a violation; all "cover versions," that is, are copyrightable, whether as a MIDI file or a tape-cassette sitting next to the bar at an open mike night. As to who owns the copyright on the MIDI performance (the programmer or the "peformer") ... see you in court, partner. But I'd put my money on the programmer; when Henry James dictated his last novel, the typist didn't have a copyright claim ... and I'd bet the same principle applies here, unless in some way the "performing" of the program involved a creative contribution above rote machine-manipulation.63.17.50.124 (talk) 09:04, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

I think you are completely wrong here. A score published and copyrighted can cover "performance" rights. You cannot perform someone else's sheet music in public, for example, if it is copyrighted—the resulting performance, even though it contains much of the performer's creativity, is still a derivative work and a copyright violation if not within fair use constraints. See Copyright Basics. And your reasoning on as to whether creators or transcribers own the copyright is probably not correct either. Slavish copying of creative work does not generate copyright, as discussed earlier in this thread (see Feist v. Rural). Recording someone performing (however recorded) does not give a copyright to the recorder, but to the performer (if I record a song someone sings, whether by cassette tape or stenographer, it is still a derivative work). --Mr.98 (talk) 01:06, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

Hang on. 63.17 was talking about a score published and copyrighted, of music that itself is not copyrighted. Say for example, the sheet music I bought a while ago of J.S. Bach's Art of Fugue. The score is copyrighted--and rightly so: it usefully provides all four fugue voices on their own staves with Bach's original weird clefs, which lays the fugue logic out precisely, as well as a two staff "reduction" that is easier to read and play. So when you say, "You cannot perform someone else's sheet music in public, for example, if it is copyrighted", do you really mean to suggest that I could not publically perform Bach's Art of Fugue freely, with this sheet music on the piano? That my performance would be a "derivative work"? Seems to me it would simply be Bach's Art of Fugue, played live. I find it hard to believe it matters what sheet music is being used. I read the link you gave, and it didn't seem to say that doing so would be a copyright violation. Pfly (talk) 09:14, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

In the case of something which is a derivative work of a copyrighted work, it could get quite tricky. It's a question of how much new creativity is added by the modern transcriber. Not unlike if someone wrote a new translation of a Greek text—it's obviously derivative of the original, now public domain text, but there is additional creativity involved, and so it creates a new copyright claim. Exactly how much of a claim—how much new material—is the sort of not-straightforward thing that a judge would rule on.

As for playing such a thing, I don't know. If the score itself is original enough to warrant a defendable copyright claim (which it may or may not be, depending on the context—just because it is labeled as "copyright 1996" or whatever does not mean that such a claim would hold up in court), then performances of that score would be, as I read the copyright pamphlet, a derivative work as well. I suspect in such a case that there would be a very strong fair use claim because the 1. added creativity to the original is going to be probably be just a small percentage of the overall artistic content of the work, 2. the purpose of much of the "additions" is to be able to faithfully render the tonal quality to be indistinguishable from the original (which gets into Bridgeman v. Corel territory—creative work that seeks only to remove any evidence of its own creativity does not seem strongly protected), and 3. the performance itself is bound to be transformative and traditionally in fair use cases that counts for a lot.

But all of this is legal hair-splitting and would require not only someone much, much more formally versed in copyright law than I am (or anyone on here, who all seem at best to have about the same exposure to the same basic concepts and maybe a Lawrence Lessig book or two), but probably would not be determined decisively outside of the context of a court room. In some ways this reminds me of the kinds of questions (from what I have seen) that law students are required to write three-hour exams on. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:25, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

Yeah - I'm pretty sure you're right about that. What would be the point of buying sheet music if you had to pay the publisher a dollar every time you played the music printed on it?! It would be different if the musical composition (or some special arrangement of it) were in copyright - but we're talking strictly old out-of-copyright music here - and no fancy 'arrangement' - just what the notes that the original composer wrote down. The only thing the publisher of the sheet music adds in terms of creativity is the physical layout and representation of the notes on the page - and when you perform the piece using the score, that information is not present in your performance - hence you owe them nothing. The final performance would sound no different whether you'd used this publisher's score or anyone else's - or merely memorized how to play the music from a CD.

But right now, I'm only interested in the MIDI-file case. This is a bit trickier because the actual audio (an MP3 or an OGG file or something) is generated entirely automatically from the MIDI-file "score" - which is known to be copyrightable because the law treats it exactly like a paper score. So the question is: Why would the totally automatic conversion from MIDI-file 'score' to audio be any different from a perfect human piano player mindlessly playing a piece from a printed score? SteveBaker (talk) 14:35, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

"What would be the point of buying sheet music if you had to pay the publisher a dollar every time you played the music printed on it?!" It is really important to emphasize here that this logic does not hold true in general regarding sheet music. As ASCAP is quick to point out: "Copyright owners enjoy a number of different rights including performance rights, print rights and recording rights. Rental or purchase of sheet music or the purchase of a record does not authorize its public performance." Now whether performance rights of out-of-copyright music can hold for copyrighted sheet music, I don't know. But this seems to me to be well out of the ability of us on the Ref Desk to common-sensibly reason through—this is a pretty complicated copyright law question, and the common-sensical approach is probably wrong.

As for your last question, again, very complicated—depends on the resolution of a number of very thorny IP legal questions. Does a human performance automatically endow it with creativity, even if the final product is indistinguishable from a machine performance? Do we really concede that machine performance is devoid of legal creativity? Does the translation between formats constitute "transformation" in the legal sense? If you think any of these are straightforward, I caution you against the notion. Note that "machine reading of human sentences" is currently a major, on-going copyright dispute relating to e-books. If there is existing case law on this, or a straightforward answer, I haven't seen it—but again, we are really getting far beyond the "five dorks on a message board who have a reasonable understanding of copyright basics, as they primarily apply to Wikipedia licensing issues" capacity, which is all I see evident here (and I include myself in that category). --Mr.98 (talk) 18:28, 27 June 2010 (UTC)

Court etiquette

I've never actually been to court (other than speeding violation court) but from the general access provided by films over the years, it seems as though the courtroom etiquette in Philadelphia (film) is very different than anything else I've ever seen (in particular: how Denzel Washington is asked to step away from the defendant, how there's a blockade of some sort between the judge and the defense/prosecution, how the bailiff wears a suit, etc.). Is this just how they do it in Philadelphia (the city) or is the film not supposed to be set in 1993? DRosenbach ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 21:19, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

How can this question be up for so long and still not receive any comments? DRosenbach ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 17:43, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

It's been less than 24 hours. That isn't that long, especially for a very specialist question (there probably aren't many ref deskers that know about Philadelphia courts). The instructions at the top of the page say you may have to wait up to 4 days to get a full response. Please be patient. --Tango (talk) 17:53, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm thankful that Refdesk editors who are ignorant of the answer aren't posting. This is an improvement from a month ago when you would have received at least two unreferenced and unhelpful opinions from editors who didn't know what they were talking about. Comet Tuttle (talk) 23:13, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Go to court and find out for yourself. It's free. Zoonoses (talk) 23:17, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I've served on a few juries in Massachusetts, and I don't recall the courtroom scenes in Philadelphia seeming unusual. Here is a photograph of a Philadelphia courtroom. It looks much like courtrooms in which I've sat in Massachusetts. What about it seems unusual to you? Either Pennsylvania and Massachusetts have an unusual type of courtroom in common with each other but not with other states, or your perception may be inaccurate. Marco polo (talk) 00:43, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

The OP asks about "how Denzel Washington is asked to step away from the defendant, how there's a blockade of some sort between the judge and the defense/prosecution, how the bailiff wears a suit." The judge in a trial court has overwhelming discretion to tell people what to do while they're in the courtroom. I haven't seen the movie, but the above three examples are things a judge could do. If the judge overstepped, the offended party could request sanctions or a State/Federal Bar ethics charge. If the judge's behavior arguably affected any rulings or the case's outcome, an appeal could be filed. 63.17.50.124 (talk) 09:21, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

When I have served on juries in Massachusetts, I have seen the judge correct attorneys or ask them to do things differently. Asking the lawyer to step away from the defendant seems entirely within the normal role of a judge. In Massachusetts courtrooms, the judge sits in his (or her) own booth, separated from both attorneys and from other persons in the court. As I recall, bailiffs in Massachusetts wear a dress shirt and a tie, but not a jacket, but it would not be surprising to see one in a suit. Nothing that the questioner described seemed at odds with my experience of courtrooms in Massachusetts. Marco polo (talk) 13:08, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Movies tend to have the lawyers up close to the witness for dramatic effect. The actual result of doing things that way would be that no one else in the courtroom could hear their exchange. In my state of North Carolina, attorneys must stay at their desks while questioning witnesses. Perhaps Philadelphia is the same. --Sean 18:06, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

Ecoterrorism

Who was the person who first coined the term ecoterrorism? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.176.14.2 (talk) 04:44, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known use of the term "eco-terrorism" was as a headline in the Globe and Mail on 23 August 1980, so probably a sub-editor there. Warofdreams talk 09:50, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

The OED says no such thing. That's the earliest use they quote, but they make no claim to document earliest known uses of words. Algebraist 11:58, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes, they do, as their information for A level students states: "the OED quotes from the earliest material that can be found featuring the word". Warofdreams talk 14:47, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

It's the earliest use known to the OED, and the OED are pretty good at that kind of research so it is probably the earliest verifiable use known to anyone (other than the people that actually used it themselves, I suppose). --Tango (talk) 18:13, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm sure they have a policy like OED:RS.Cuddlyable3 (talk) 18:28, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Well, more like OED:V. They don't care if the usage of the word was correct, just that the word was used. --Tango (talk) 19:05, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

And, as you imply, used some place they could verify, which normally means a printed source although for sufficiently recent words it could be an Internet source. In any case, it would only be the earliest verifiable use known to them at the time the entry was drafted. Unless the earliest use of a word describes how the speaker invented it, it's always possible someone else used it earlier. Actually, even if it does do that, it's still possible, since someone else could invent the same word independently. --Anonymous, 21:32 UTC, June 22, 2010.

Some reasonably modern words have audio recordings as their first known usage. The phrase "something for the weekend" is a good example of that. --Tango (talk) 21:42, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

This article[1] credits Ron Arnold as "Father of the Wise Use Movement and Creator of the Term “Ecoterrorism”", apparently based on [2]. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 15:40, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

That says 1983 though so later than the OED quote. Dmcq (talk) 09:55, 23 June 2010 (UTC)