BBC In Trouble Over Free Music

Take a Byte Out of Crime writes "According to this article, British classical labels are claiming that the BBC giving away the these symphonies, which were performed by the BBC Orchestra for free, constitutes unfair government competition. Apparently all free music really is illegal these days, or soon will be, public domain be damned."

Comments

Re:The next logical step

[einhverfr]

is that corporations will sue private citizens giving things away for free, claiming "unfair competition by [those people who damn well should be] the buying public."

Funny you should mention that.

Check This story from the Guardian out

It's both

[Sycraft-fu]

So if you compose a song, it is protected under copyright. People cannot go and repreform that song without giving you royalties. Now in the US, reperformances, called covers, have statutory royalties, so the copyright holder doesn't have much say in it, but you still have to pay them.

However the performance is seperate, and also copyrighted. While osmeone can do a cover of your song, they can't just copy your performance without permissions.

This also means that though a given song may be public domain, a particular performance isn't. So all Motzart's works are public domain, you can post the sheet music on the net freely, without fear. However a specific performance of that music may be copyrighted. You can, of course do your own performance, or comission to be done, but you can't just (legally) copy their performance.

Both are seen as creative works. It is a creative work to create a song, but it is also a creative work to play that song. The musicians have a lot to do with the rendition of it, espically with classical music and I can say as a former classical musician, it's not easy.

Now in this case, you are allowed to trade the specific performance freely as well. The orignal songs are of course long out of copyright, and the BBC has chosen to give their work in to the public domain, which is their right.

The challenge is from greedy labels, not over copyright, but over unfair competition. They claim it's unfair that the BBC, which is taxpayer funded, is giving away works that compete with ones they sell. However the status of the copyright isn't being challenged. The BBC Orchestra performed it, and the BBC chose to relinquish the performance to public domain, that's a done deal.

So There are other places...

[mitsuhama]

to get your free http://hebb.mit.edu/FreeMusic/ classical music.

Naxos lost New York expired copyright court case

[alanw]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/441 5829.stm

Naxos issue low cost CDs of classical recordings. Three months ago they lost a court case brought by the Capitol label.

A major change to US music copyright practices could be in the offing after a court ruled a record label broke the law by reissuing old recordings.

New York's highest court said Naxos was wrong to release classical recordings by Yehudi Menuhin and others - even though they were out of copyright.

The court said such recordings were still covered by common law.

BBC Funding

[ear1grey]

Agreed, but purely for the record:

"They have paid for them in their tax dollars, which their elected representatives chose to spend, via the BBC, on their creation via recording."

• we still use Sterling, not Dollars or Euros
• the money is collected through a licence fee, not a direct tax,
• our elected representatives have no direct say in BBC funding because it works under a Royal Charter, this keeps it independent of the government, and thus, free to report the government's business without bias.

The BBC has kindly summarised it's next 10 years here.

Re:No

[Tim C]

No.

1) the score is in the public domain (Mozart died centuries ago!), anyone can perform it

2) anyone who does perform it (or depending on the exact details of the agreement, commissions such a performance) owns the rights to that performance

3) the BBC commissioned such a performance, and owns the rights to it

4) it is this performance that the BBC is distributing

5) no-one is suing anyone; no-one has any legal grounds to do so

6) the idiot who's mouthing off is being a cry-baby about the government (the BBC is state-owned, but independently managed) giving away for free things that he and his associates are trying to sell, claiming that it's "unfair competition"

The BBC is perfectly within its legal rights to do what it is doing. What's more, as I help fund the BBC (through the licence fee), it could be argued that I have a moral right to access these recordings, as I helped pay for them. But then I tend to believe that anything that is produced by or on behalf of the government should be accessible to all (where appropriate - obviously there should be exceptions for security reasons, I don't want to know the details of troop movements, etc)