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Complete Mozart Works Now Free
An anonymous reader writes "Mozart's year-long 250th birthday party is ending on a high note with the musical scores of his complete works available for the first time free on the Internet. Although most classical music is obviously too old to be under copyright, the rights to specific editions of pieces are owned by the publishers. Now, the International Mozart Foundation has acquired the right to publish the prestigious New Mozart Edition of every Mozart work on the internet. The response has been so overwhelming that the Foundation has been forced to increase their server capacity."
Can you download the music files also? If so, where are the links?
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They finally finished reassembling him, eh? And he creates new works without charging a penny, eh?? EXCELLENT!
I now command the recently re-animated corpse of Mozart to pen me a symphony, with no expectation of compensation! POST-HASTE!
Before anyone gets too excited -- there are plenty of public-domain editions of Mozart. This is just one particular edition that's going to be available online for free. There's actually a huge amount of PD sheed music available at Mutopia. The nice thing about the Mutopia stuff is that it's in a format that's editable using free software (Lilypond). For instance, I've taken some Mozart horn duets and arranged them so my daughter and I can play them on violin and viola. Because it's in Lilypond format, it's easy to transpose, arrange, whatever. If all you want is digital scans of PD editions, there are various sites that will let you download scans for free. One thing that seems a little goofy about the NMA thing is that they make you agree to use this web site only for personal study and not to make copies except for my personal use under "Fair Use" principles of Copyright law as defined in this license agreement. Uh ... fair use is an exception to copyright. Hell, I can copy a Britney Spears CD and call it fair use.
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What they have put up is hardly "free"; it requires you to agree to a license agreement that limits you to "personal use" under "fair use" principles. Well, geez, you already could copy the music under those principles before.
Companies like Barereiter have been playing tricks with copyright for a long time, for example, by slightly modifying sheet music every few years with meaningless (and often, erroneous) "interpretations".
This is not how music should be treated 200 years after a composer's death, in particular in the day and age of the Internet. There is no reason why Mozart's entire body of work shouldn't be digitized and freely available with no restrictions on use at all, in a form like Project Gutenberg.
Many people here seem, as expected, look more on the copyright side of the issue. The fact is, getting such an edition together is *not* easy by any stretch. That particular edition itself (Neue Mozart-Ausgabe) took 36 years (finished in 1991) to complete. Consider the amount of money that has to be paid to musicologists to do research for the 35 years. Obviously Barenreiter doesn't want to give it away for free. So the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum *bought* the rights of online publication from Barenreiter, and of course even then there will be limits to what you can do with it. Obviously you cannot use these scans to publish and sell your own version of it. I consider Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum very very generous, and I thank them for it.
Also, the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe is NOT public domain in any sense of the word, because of the editing. As professional musicians know, editing is *not* something you suddenly decide to do, or something where you change a few notes and that's that. It is a long process where you research all evidence (including conflicting ones), and try to build an edition that the composer himself would have approved of. And for most editions (and all of the Barenreiter ones) a critical report comes with each piece; and it documents the path of research and the evidence used.
If you want truly public domain Mozart scores, try the Alte Mozart-Ausgabe (the old complete edition), which is completely in the public domain, with partial scans if it circulating around the net. Though, if you checked on wikipedia, you'll realize how big a difference there is between the Alte and Neue Mozart-Ausgabes.
This edition is copyrighted.
Mozart in the original would be of use only to an academic --- How do you read his notation? What instruments was he writing for? --- and so on.
Students are being given "fair use" rights to study modern "translations" of Mozart.
Musicians are not being given rights to public performance of the scores. There is a difference and it is a difference that matters.
at ThePierateBay, duh.
It's poetry with a beat behind it! And guns! They're like beatniks with automatic weapons.
The only scores definitely in the public domain are Mozart's original autographs. Engraved editions of his music, provided they were produced after 1923, are under copyright.
By the way, that "1923" is a local US thing. The equivalent date in the UK, for example, would be "1980" (1981 from next month...): it's 25 years from the end of the year of first publication, for the copyright in an original typography of a per-se out-of-copyright work. (And editions made by photoreproduction of a previously published typography don't qualify for a fresh copyright of this kind.) It's also worth noting that this period for 'publisher's' copyrights is set by s.15 of the 1988 copyright act in the UK and was left unchanged when the duration of the _author's_ copyrights was extended from 50 years to 70 years from the end of the year of the author's death (1995 regulations).
Aside from that, plenty of useful Mozart scores (e.g. many from Breitkopf and Haertel) were published in the 19th century, and are copyright-free even in the US, where Dover Publications for a long time provided a very useful service by republishing quite some numbers of them at reasonable prices.
Creating a definitive text from various scribbled manuscripts is painstaking work, it's no surprise that copyright law covers this process as well as that of purely original works.
The copyright in the NMA (Baerenreiter) scores appears to depend on two factors, (a) fresh typography and (b) the extent of significant editorial revisions. The first factor applies to all of the new-set scores, (and where the 25-year rule applies, some of these copyrights are already approaching or have even reached their end). The second factor may possibly not apply to all works, because to produce them it was certainly not usually a matter of "creating a definitive text from various scribbled manuscripts", some of the new editions differ from the old out-of-copyright ones by nothing more than a few corrected articulation-marks here or there -- like a few commas or periods of musical punctuation. But where the second factor does apply, it will presumably be an author's copyright timed by the lifetime + 70 years of the significant editor if any.
Like one of the earlier posters, I also don't 'get it' that a scan of an out-of-copyright score can attract a fresh copyright -- and yet, it was a private assertion of this kind (not tested in any court as far as I know) that effectively drove a set of scans of old and out-of-copyright Mozart scores off the internet within the past few years.
The complexity of copyright provisions, and their general unknown-ness, is clearly in itself a factor that takes away people's freedoms even to part of the extent that laws supposedly assure those freedoms. It is not often enough mentioned that, in this way, legal complications in themselves limit freedom.
-wb-
But seriously, the proper phrase is that you want someone else's information to be free. Information doesn't want anything.
Look, if some dude feeds 5000 people with 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish, it's a miracle. If Linus Thorvalds provides Linux for all of mankind from a single master copy, big whoop. Fundamentally if I eat a fish, the fish is consumed. If I watch a movie, it is not.
In classic economics you have the term "natural price", which means the zero-profit price ignoring R&D. For the abstract concept information. ignoring media costs - for example the difference between a blank and recorded CD - the natural cost is zero. That is the market price with perfect competition, everything else is caused by imperfections or government regulations in the market. In that sense, it's perfectly reasonable to say that information "wants to" be free.
Of course a whole other story is that there'd be no commercial market, because you have a non-zero investment and zero profits. That is why even the founding fathers, who hardly were mouthpieces for copyright holders recognized copyright to "promote the science and arts". In addition, there's many other factors which means this isn't a perfect market. However, that only changes the market price, not the natural price. The more of these you remove, the more it will approach its natural price, whether you anthropomorphize it or not.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
As a musician, let me tell you that music is not like software. This music is truly free because, well, you don't need to buy it. There is nothing in the license that says you cannot perform it; there is nothing in the license that says you cannot charge people to listen to your performance. For what it is, a publication of sheet music for free, it is an amazing thing because sheet music is usually a very expensive thing. Additionally, the editing house that produced this edition (Bärenreiter) is almost universally regarded as the best and is therefore the most expensive. The complete score for the Mozart requiem (something I use only because I need to pick one up) normally costs 120.00 euros. That is a fat wad of cash, and now something I don't need to spend.
This is intended for musicians who want to play or for teachers who want to use Mozart as examples in their class (instead of copying out of books, which is technically illegal, but widely done because how else are you going to conveniently give students something that they can look at and analyze and learn from?). In those cases, there would be no reason to need to download the whole thing or redistribute it. If you will accept the poor analogy, sheet music is like source code; when you learn is and perform it, it's like compiling it. Here, these people are giving out the source code, but they are making sure that the only place the source code is gotten from is their website. The license is no more onerous than the GPL; there are conditions that you must accept if you want to download and use it.
It has been a nervous year, with people beginning to feel like Christian Scientists with appendicitis.