[Upd-discuss] Re: [Creative-friends] burning the public domain

[James Davis]

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 peter.lockley@okfn.org wrote:

> I had a number of conversations yesterday with people at the Patent and
> Copyright offices. Without doubt the 'official' view is that the expiry
> of the sound recording copyright alone leaves you the public with
> basically the same permissions as you had before: if the lyrics are
> copyrighted, distribution of the 'public' sound recording represents an
> infringement of authorial copyright.

Apologies for those annoyed by my cross-posting, I thought this was also
sufficiently interesting for everyone over on upd-discuss. Who did you
speak to at the Patent office?

I'm certainly not an expert but this sounds like complete FUD. The type of
copyright that exists over a musical score is exactly the same copyright
type that exists over song lyrics. There's no distinction between words
used as prose or lyrics under copyright. If the recording is in the public
domain, the same logic would imply that you were infringing the copyright
of the musical score as well as the copyright of the lyrics and recording
copyrights would be completely redundant.

James