Happy resolution

I just received an email from Rafael Ornes at cpdl.org, informing me that the page that caused all my most recent ranting has been removed.

I apologise unreservedly for unwittingly causing a slight delay in its removal myself by, erm, sending my initial complaint to the wrong email address.

Throughout all of this I have defended anyone’s right to make a musical arrangement for their own use, but I cannot condone the simple re-copying of a piece of music simply to avoid paying for the edition upon which it is based, or to evade someone else’s copyright. If you plan to produce an edition of 17th or 18th century music, locate a library that has a copy of the original and work from that! It’s really quite easy when you get into it…

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Rights and responsibilities 2

To be honest, not much has happened since my last post.

Someone with linkds to cpdl has written “explaining” his take on cpdl’s take on copyright issues. His argument that posters to the site should list the source of their edition

was rejected at the time because it was felt that most users are interested in performing, rather than critical editions, and that while contributors would be able to identify the source from which they made their edition, most would not be able to specify the original source

In short, no matter whose rights they infringed, the important thing was to make the music available for free. The fact the the posting in question openly admitted it was stolen from a clearly copyrighted PDF on the Prima la musica! website does not seem to have any impact on the discussion.

Meanwhile, I have had zero response from either sheetmusic.com who advertise on the site – Vincent Novello will be turning in his grave. Nor have any of the major publishing companies I contacted been in touch – perhaps they’ve just accepted that their editions are bound to be ripped off at some stage in the future. So good luck to them, I say.

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Rights and responsibilities

Today I received some feedback from a “global moderator” on cpdl.org. Apparently he/she will recommend that the posting which effectively hijacked and sabotaged both Dennis Collins’ excellent editorial work and our joint copyrights be removed from their listing. But wait! Not because of the above, but

rather because it has been customary to post only complete works on CPDL that only complete works to be posted. [SIC]

Brandishing US “free use” legislation like a light sabre, the moderator claims that a US-based website is not liable to European Union copyright laws. Furthermore focussing on graphic rather than intellectual rights, (s)he continues:

Thus, if someone in the UK makes a photocopy of a work protected by a graphical copyright, the photocopy is infringing. However, as I understand it, a public domain work protected by graphical copyright is set in a manner that does not replicate the original exactly does not infringe the original copyright. This would seem to be what happened here, where the figured bass was replaced by a realization, however crude that realization may, or may not be.

By that argument, any edition can be reworked by anyone, anywhere in the world, irrespective of the standard of the work and then posted to cpdl.org (together with a link back to the original owner’s website, remember!), asking if anyone out there in the real world has the complete piece. Remember also that the complete work is available from Prima la musica! for the massive sum of £4, with an option on a written-out continuo part for £10 (which, considering it will take considerably more than an hour to do, is pretty good value).

My rant yesterday inspired me to delve deeper into what is on offer at cpdl.org. For no particular reason, I ended up comparing the two editions listed of a piece by Gesualdo (Mercè grido piangendo) and was amazed by the differences. One is in that typical late 16th century time signature 4/4 throughout, while the other varies between common and triple time (the latter represented by the equally common 6/2…) In the absence of ANY editorial information, how is one to decide which (if either) one can trust? I think it is wonderful that such marvellous music is available – not everyone has access to the originals (or even the Gesualdo Edition), and being able to have copies of just one madrigal from a particular set is doubtless very useful.

It seems Dennis too was driven to explore cpdl.org and he threw up another fundamental problem with the “let’s pinch someone else’s edition” principle – pace the “global moderator”, that is essentially what we are talking about here: most of the Monteverdi scores listed are based on the Complete Edition by Malipiero and, as anyone who has bothered to check the original sources will know, his scores are anything but reliable. To have them reproduced (for whatever reason) is simultaneously shameful and shameless. Those of us who work in the field (trying to eke out a living which cpdl.org’s users would take away from us) make great efforts to track down often multiple original sources in order to produce a thoroughly reliable text, listing all the problems the source material sets us, and detailing how we have dealt with those problems. Dennis also pointed out that the re-settings of Schütz’s Kleine geistliche Konzerte (broken links on cpdl.org, but available from that other free download site, werner icking archive) not only fail to correct Spitta’s transcription errors but add a few of their own.

Like so many aspects of Western life nowadays, everyone is desperately keen to assert their rights. Unfortunately most everyone fails to accept the fundamental premise that with rights come responsibilities. Yes, you are at liberty to spend your time typesetting music for your own use, but – if you plan to share the fruits of your labours with the rest of the world – you owe it to them at least to get the notes right. If you include a continuo realization, it should at least be musical. I cannot imagine the moderators on Wikipedia tolerating an illiterate article, so why should ChoralWiki be any different?

Just as an aside: while I am grateful that I did get a response from cpdl.org, I should point out that it was not in response to my email (which bounced) but rather to a colleague’s posting on another site… I’m not the only one who is outraged by this situation. Thankfully.

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Nothing is free in this world

Let’s get one thing straight before I burst into full-on rant – I am proudly Scottish and I love a bargain! My shopping trolley is frequently full of BOGOFS (Buy-One-Get-One-Free offers), mostly things I didn’t even know I needed…

So, rant time. Earlier today, one of our editors emailed me to ask if I was aware that one of his editions of Charpentiers Responsories for Holy Week had been hijacked by someone and listed on cpdl.org. For those not in the know, this is one of several websites which offer free downloads of editions. The page on display was not actually an extract from our edition, but a re-setting of the single page extract which is available on http://www.primalamusica.com for most of our editions which not only omits Charpentier’s figured bass, but also the poster’s illiterate realization of a continuo part.

I don’t know if I’m more angry that the website allows their users to upload totally unvetted material and include links to company websites whose permission they most definitely never sought, or that the association of our editions and hard work with the utterly unmusical material this random has posted on the internet. How DARE they?

The supposed reason for the post at all is that some of our editions do no include a continuo realization. This is something that I leave to the discretion of our editors. Some (myself included) feel there is a fine line between making the music available to musicians of all abilities and not supplying at least a skeletal accompaniment will dissuade less confident performers from even trying. Others feel that a fully written-out accompaniment is both an anachronism and an additional layer of interpretation of the source material which also discourages them from acquiring the skills necessary to read (un)figured bass lines – why should continuo players be tied to the printed text while all those around them decorate and improvise on the parts they’ve been given?

The fact is, though, that a performing set for the work in question (i.e., two copies of the score – one for the singer and one for the continuo player) retails at £4. Prima la musica! as a company also offers customers the chance to commission a written-out continuo part for any of our publications for the grand sum of £10 – is that really such an enormous amount of money? Perhaps I got it wrong. Perhaps I should spend hours and hours producing editions and load them all to cpdl.org for free?

Does Israel1992 (the cpdl.org poster) have a day job? Does he get paid? Would he like me to offer his customers the same service free and thereby put him out of a job? Maybe I could offer him free continuo lessons so that, at the very least, anything he typesets in Sibelius at least stands a chance of being musically literate. Sorry – rant rather than logical argument. But you’ll forgive me if this sort of thing really annoys me.

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