Mozart’s Latest Track Just Dropped – OpEd
By Katrina Gulliver
A new piece by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has beendiscovered.
Believed to have been written when Mozart was a teenager, the 12-minute composition premiered in Salzburg on September 19. It has also now been performed by the Leipzig Opera.
Mozart is long dead, of course, and this composition is in the public domain. If you want to get together with friends, record a version this weekend, and upload it to Spotify, you are free to do so.
But during his life he had no benefit of copyright protection, either, as there was no copyright in 18th-century Austria. Copyright in England existed, thanks to the Statute of Anne in 1710—but applied only to books. Music coverage would come decades later.
It was only from the mid-19th century that composers could hold on to the rights of their compositions. As with books, copyright expanded over the decades, and international agreements came into force, supporting the rights of creators to their own work. After the introduction of recording technology, additional layers of rights could be attached to a particular song: the rights of the composer, the recording artists, and other musicians and producers.
(An additional common confusion around copyright exists when it comes to music: while an orchestral piece written in the 1700s is in the public domain, a recording of it by the Berlin Philharmonic in 1987 is not.)
This web of participants means the world of popular music is a regular source of copyright lawsuits. Older tracks are sampled or re-recorded, and courts must sometimes decide how long a sequence of notes counts as intellectual property.
Today, law school textbooks include such cases asQueen and David Bowie v. Vanilla Ice,Roy Orbison v. 2 Live Crew, and the stunningFantasy v. John Fogerty, in which Fogerty was sued for copying his own work.
Intellectual property rights in music are why 1960s country singer Geoff Mack is credited on Rihanna’s “Where Have You Been,” and k.d. lang was belatedly given credit on the Rolling Stones song “Anybody Seen My Baby?” after a distinct similarity to her “Constant Craving” was pointed out. (The Rolling Stones themselves have been on both sides of this, having previously sued The Verve for ripping them off in “Bittersweet Symphony.”) The estate of Marvin Gaye seems to keep attorneys on speed dial to sue anyone who records something resembling his work.
The sheer number of cases shows just how thorny copyright issues can be. That property rights need to be respected in order for the market to function goes without saying. That artistic creations are property that should also be respected is the basis of copyright law. But who can hold on to rights—for instance, to a fragment of a melody—and for how long, is a different question. Case law continues to evolve, as legislation has also lengthened a creator’s rights—now 70 years after the creator’s death, in US law. (For works published or registered before 1978, the maximum copyright duration is 95 years from the date of publication.)
Murray Rothbard, inMan, Economy, and State, defended copyright as a valuable tool for protecting rights. But how much copyright is too much is also a debate that has previously been discussed in articleshere at FEE. Disney’s attempts to turn their control over Mickey Mouse into a perpetuity stretches the conceptbeyond any reasonableness clause.
Nonetheless, most of us like to see artistic creators able to profit from their work. Their value in the market is what allows big stars like Taylor Swift to create her own brand, and support an industry of recording and touring. She can profit from her work in a way composers in Mozart’s day never could. That’s a good thing.
- About the author: Katrina Gulliver holds a PhD from Cambridge University, and has held faculty positions at universities in Germany, Britain and Australia. She has written for Wall St Journal, Reason, The American Conservative, National Review and the New Criterion, among others.
- Source: This article was published at FEE