Al, you say; "Enough of this cr_p. We have worn this subject to the ground. Get a life and let's go on to something else! Well, can I say, gently and with respect, that personally I enjoy this discussion, which is certainly at least tangentially related to our work. Al, you could just ignore posts on this topic - don;t read them. I apprecaite however, that you may be concerned about the bandwidth used up on it. David, you make an interesting related point about the accuracy of any information, and the vaue of citing a source - a standard procedure in scholarship of course. You also say: "Also, since there are multiple sources for this type of information how would you possibly determine a breach of copyright had occurred (even if the information itself was copywrited-which I'm inclined to believe from my legal resources that it is not). You are correct that the information is not copyright. That is the case in both US and UK law. The USA Copyright Act of 1976 can be read online at http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html Your point about multiple sources is also significant. I could, tomorrow, put up a website with a listing of all Steinway piano numbers. Would the publishers of Pierce sue me? They might. Would they win? I do not think they could. I do not possess a copy of Pierce. In all my life, I have held it in my hand for about five minutes and that over twenty years ago. But I DO have The UK Piano Atlas and its two supplements, published by Omicron Publishing, which lists all the Steinway (and other makes) numbers. How would Pierce establish that I had copied the Pierce Piano Atlas? They could not! Israel, you mention: "Due to a court decision it is currently not protected by copyright in the US. But in most of the rest of the world it is. And since this list circulates internationally, this would likely be a violation of British or Australian law - which might just have jurisdiction due to the circulation of the list. And there is legislation pending in the US to negate this court decision and restore copyright protection to the data to collections such as Pierce (and telephone books and other such compilations)" US copyright law seems to strongly enshire the principle that *facts, information, ideas* cannot be copyright. What seems to have "failed" in the decision on the phonebook case, if indeed there was a failure, is the protection of an *arrangerment* of information as a "work". As it stands, The UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 is extremely similar to US copyright law and would not proect piano numbers - only the typographical arrangement of them on a page in a particular way. >From time to time, it is necessary to amend existing laws or make new ones, as society and technology move on. Before the 1988 Act in the UK, for example, the previous law was from 1956 - long before ordinary households had access to photocopiers, cassette recorders, etc. The 1988 act was itself updated by a Statutary Instrument in 1995, which extended the duration of copyright to come into line with European legislation. Although there have been Regulations produced relating to electronic dissemination, it is quite possible that brand new legislation is needed in all countries to take into account the revolution of the internet in the last decade. It is, of course, the role of Judges to *interpret* the law and to apply it to each case in hand. From time to time courts will arrive at a decision that seems to fly in the face of commonsense, and is then pranded a "perverse" decision. A prime - and music-related - example of what's been called a perverse copyright decision, is the Hyperion v. Sawkins case. You can read about it here: http://blogs.magnatune.com/buckman/2005/05/hyperion_record.html Essentially, Hyperion wanted to make a CD of the music of 18th Centruy French composer Lalande. They hired a musicologist called Dr Sawkins to consult the original handwritten scores and prepare a modern performing edition of Lalande's music. Sawkins was to add no music of his own, merely to put Lalande's music together in a prepared edition. Sawkins subsequently claimed that even though he had produced no new music, he had created an "original work" in terms of the 1988 Copyright Act. He won on appeal - a decision with huge potential consequences for the recording industry. The result was a huge outpouring of support for Hyperion from many of the Great and Good in the music world. I don't know if the blog about it is still online, but it was full of Big Names. Many donated funds to pay Hyperion's costs. I would like here to "'plug" Hyperion, because my own interaction with them was so positive. I emailed them to ask permission to use an article by a former employee in a set of copyright notes I was preparing for students. Within two hours I had a cordial reply from Mr Perry himself, the founder of the company, giving permission. Buy Hyperion CDs folks! Best regards, David. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/pianotech.php/attachments/20080601/47eb2f4f/attachment.html
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