COPYRIGHT ESSENTIALS
9 Copyright: An Expert Panel
Kathleen DeLaurenti
Our expert panel of musician-scholars have a variety of experiences with copyright in their work. They have engaged with the copyrighted work of others, leveraged the public domain, and engaged with how exceptions to copyright law work in different contexts.
Many musician-scholars like Christina Farrell and Kyoko Kitamura also express concerns about how complicated and necessary it is to have a basic understanding of copyright:
“I don’t feel like I’m well informed about copyright. Admittedly, it’s something that I probably just try to avoid dealing with.” Christina Farrell
“There’s a disconnect now with copyright law because it’s such an old concept. It grew partially out of the printing press, right? Now there’s no physical barrier to copying digital material. We’re obviously in a very different place. It’s so complicated. Simplicity, convenience, people understanding what it’s about is really important. I don’t think we’re there.” Kyoko Kitamura
When copyright expires and a work enters the public domain, we have new creative opportunities to engage with that work. Our expert panelists have found rich opportunities to leverage public domain materials to develop new work.
“I would say that thinking about finding uncopyrighted material has led to some very creative decisions in my past. I wrote a whole bunch of songs for my undergrad recital that were based on the Apollo 11 mission. And of course, one of the wonderful things about NASA is all their material is public domain. I could take and use as text all the transcripts from that mission and that’s all totally free to use. Getting to figure out ways that I could find stuff that was historical material that was free to use was a really great experience that led to a collaboration with a staff person at NASA who got me connected with them and actually helped me digitize some as of yet undigitized film… At the same time, limitation leads to some really creative discoveries as well. Both the barriers aren’t that high, but sometimes the barriers lead us to create some original things.” Robin McGinness
Musician-scholars are also uniquely poised to understand how complicated it is having a balance in our copyright system. Because we are often creators and users of copyrighted works, we know that there are opportunities and challenges with the way that copyright impacts our creative research. Our experts are considering why copyright was created and how the system is impacting musicians, listeners, and researchers.
“Well, the problem with copyright is it’s all talking about money, isn’t it? Now that we’ve had these critical editions of composers—finally, for instance, Florence Price and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor—it’s wonderful to see their music, of course, published more and readily accessible. That’s the pro, that we’re getting it in the hands of organizations like we’ve never seen before. However, the restrictions that come sometime