Oki, here’s the deal. I was listening to some mp3’s and I started to think about the legalities of pirating music and so on and so forth, and something kind of struck me. I can understand modern day bands and what not getting choked about pirating, but the thing that struck me is this: Is it illegal to pirate Classical music?
think about it for a sec… All the classical artists are dead so who controls the copywright (or however you spell it) laws on their music? If i was charged for like, distributing MP3’s of Rachmaninov’s entire collection of works, would the charges stick, cause honestly, the guy’s dead. And when he DID live, there wasn’t any copyright laws (or was there?).
Anybody know the answer to this rather vague question of pointless confusion?
Most of the music from classical composers is in the public domain (I believe the cutoff date is around 1922 – anything earlier than that is usually PD). So you can use Beethoven’s 9th Symphony on MP3 without paying his heirs.
However, music licensing applies to a particular recording of the music. If you take Leonard Bernstein’s recording of Beethoven’s 9th, you’ll need to pay.
Generally, you don’t have to pay if you play the music yourself, but you will if you take the music from an existing recording.
Rachmaninof lived until 1943, so at least some of his music might still be under copyright. You’d have to check.
“East is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” – Marx
uie