The fantastic news that all of Mozart’s music in edited scores has been put online hit the papers two days ago. It was made possible by a $400,000 grant paid to the publisher, presumably to cover lost royalties –as if anyone could possibly calculate such a thing. In any case, it was a matter of contract, so who can complain? It’s wonderful that it is all available.
Here is the site, which crashed hours after opening. Before discussing that, a note on the apparent restriction on the use of the music. The site says “The purpose of this web site operated by the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum in cooperation with the Packard Humanities Institute is to make Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s musical compositions widely and conveniently accessible to the public, for personal study and for educational and classroom use.” Then you have to agree not to make copies except for personal use.
Oh really! So we can’t, what?, sing in them in public? Perform them? Record them? How incredibly tedious this copyright business has become. How preposterous.
Then there is the issue of the software itself. What we have here on this site seems to be a classic case: a vast piece of software apparatus that surely cost tens of thousands but works not as well as any home-made free system based on data entries and mysql. It is very difficult to navigate, and very tricky to direct link to anything. If you use your back button, it will throw you to the opening German-language page. The scores themselves are not set for fastview, or so it seems, and take an age to pull from the database.
As for the global rush on the server, technology today should be able to withstand it, if a programmer knows what he or she is doing. I’ve seen homegrown systems based on open-source software as well as dot net systems that have withstood the highest traffic overload the web can provide (umm, Mises.org, for example).
You might think that $400,000 would buy the foundation a decent user interface, but no: it does seem true — in specific cases — that in the web world, the more money you spend, the worse the quality becomes. Why? Because people are attempting to purchase what money cannot buy: the good sense and programming skill that is required to make delivery intuitive for users.
Why can’t money buy it? Because there is a huge knowledge gap between those who do the programming work and those who are paying the bills, which is to say that those who are making the decisions on the use of resources are clueless about what they are actually paying for. This leads to a coordination problem.
In any case, here is one direct link you can see, if you are lucky: the Exultate Jubilate.
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Let’s say that I download a piece of music and then practice it so much that I have it memorized. (All personal use, I presume).
Later, I decide to give a concert and charge admission. If I have the piece of music memorized, am I not allowed to perform it because of that copyright? What if I don’t bring any music to the concert?
What if I buy a copy of the music from a different vendor and stick that on the music stand in front of me? Am I legal yet?
How about if I perform the memorized music and we use a computer program to translate my live performance into sheet music? Who owns that sheet music?
Mozart wrote the Exultate Jubilate in 1773. How are there any copyright issues here?
The site is available in English if you click on the English link near the top right of the page.
I believe that the reason copyright still exists on these works is because The New Mozart Edition is a collection of works which had been owned (and presumably published) by a German publisher (Bärenreiter-Verlag) – the works have been collected over the past half a century and published sometime in the ’90s. The rights to this particular collection would have been established around the publication date (or sometime during its creation) and thus will not be in the common domain for a good century or so. (Depending on when the ‘creator’ passes away).
Copyright limits for corporations are 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, which ever is shortest.
Does this mean that the copyright still is effective?
There is a lot of misconceptions about software, its production and cost.
You see, software is *hard* to produce. Even free software is expensive. The only difference between free software and non-free software is that the software producer is eating the costs, whether for advanced marketing strategies or a simple love of the problem space.
It’s hard in another way. User interfaces are very, very difficult to produce. Commercial and non-commercial companies usually fail at producing truly good interfaces. For all their other technological failings, this is where Microsoft succeeds, far outpacing the competition. The most successful free software produced has user interfaces copied almost verbatim from a Microsoft product. Microsoft invests many, many millions of dollars every year just on user interface research.
Microsoft does not have any kind of user interface to copy, in this area.
So please understand, $400,000 is not a lot of money in the software production arena. It might give you something, but you won’t be able to hire out the best talent in all of the sub-fields of software engineering like analysis, design, code development, quality assurance, ongoing production support, after-market software patches, and even project management. Then you need enough lawyerage to make the license agreement make sense. On that amount of money many of these separate disciplines won’t even be involved at all, which have contributed to your poor quality user experience.
Certain people do exist that can encapsulate all of this into a very small team of dedicated people who simply love the problem space. However, such people are hard to find and rarely work for cheap.
Where exactly is the problem? If you want the sheets, you have to agree with a document, a treaty, a contract, that says you may not use it otherwise than for personal use?
Where is the problem with that, libertarianly speaking? A contract, a set of rules, which you voluntarily apply to and then have to obey.
A contract only works between the contract holders. If someone else hears the music or takes a picture of the sheets or whatever then they can’t be bound by the contract.
Max,
The problem is that the license agreement is not very well thought out in terms of the goals of the project. If you want online materials to be “conveniently accessible to the public” and “for educational and classroom use” then a restrictive license makes absolutely no sense.
There is no restriction on being both libertarian and stupid at the same time. What makes libertarianism unattractive to many people is the ease with which you are enabled to shoot yourself in the foot by poor application of your own free choices. The saving factor in the whole situation is that the liability is limited to only contractual partners.
Mr. Tucker wasn’t commenting on any lack of libertarianism, but more of anti-conceptual, overcompartmentalized thinking patterns. It’s an interesting problem, not so much about political economy, but a larger prblem of praxeology.
The same arguments could have been made on educational institutions that do stupid things like separating math and physics, or engineering and business. People leave school thinking these are different subjects, and can’t make the real-world connections later. I see this all the time in the world of software — engineers who can’t understand business needs, and business folk who can’t understand … well, much of anything.
When you see your children come home from school, who can do math but not “word problems”, this is a symptom of the same cause. They (and sometimes their teachers) don’t understand the fundamental connection between math (the tool) and the physics, business, or other practical problem (the reality). It’s a mind/body split problem. Remove the wacky rhetoric of both sides, and you’ll see that this is what both Robert Pirsig and Ayn Rand were often talking about, though they would have likely denounced each other.
The most successful free software produced has user interfaces copied almost verbatim from a Microsoft product
The crap open-source stuff, written by ex-Microsoft programmers (I mean programmers who started on MS, not ex-MS-employees), has user interfaces copied from MS (which copied from Apple, which originated in Xerox Smalltalk and Lisp systems back in the dark ages).
What is “the most successful free software” anyway? Mostly stuff without any UI: Apache, etc.
Microsoft does not have any kind of user interface to copy, in this area.
Umm…Microsoft’s still years behind Apple.
A contract only works between the contract holders. If someone else hears the music or takes a picture of the sheets or whatever then they can’t be bound by the contract.
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