Kahle v. AshcroftThe Gondoliers: There Lived a King
originally submitted by Pace Willisson:
This is a song in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Gondoliers.
The edition in question is a piano vocal score arranged by
J. H. Wadsworth, and was published in 1889, and available in the
collection of the Waltham, Massachusetts public library.
Stifled uses
Pace Willisson:
In about the year 2000, I wanted to make a free version of the entire
vocal score of The Gondoliers available on the web, and I decided to
start with this song. Using an 1889 arrangement that I checked out
from the Waltham, Massachusetts library, I entered the music and words
into the music typesetting program Lilypond, creating a publication
quality score. I then submitted the resulting files to the Mutopia
project (www.mutopiaproject.org), a site dedicated to publishing
public domain music, not only in printer ready format, but also with
all the associated data needed so users can further edit the music.
My submission was rejected on the grounds that, although the music and
words are clearly in the public domain (Gilbert died in 1911 and
Sullivan died in 1900), the copyright on the arrangement may still be in
force. It apparently depends on the date of death of the arranger,
Wadsworth, and I have not been able to locate any information about
him. The mutopia administrators say that if he were a young man when
the original score was published, he may have lived long enough that
his copyright could still be in force. I don't know enough about the
copyright law to know if their analysis is correct, but neither they
nor I can hire a lawyer to advise us on this issue, so my work remains
unavailable from this useful distribution site.
Therefore, I abandoned my project to enter the rest of The Gondoliers
score. Even though The Gondoliers was created in 1889 and ought to be
completely free to use, people are effectively forced to pay about $25
per cast member to buy commercially printed scores, rather than print
them out from free files on the internet. And, since the underlying
data files are not available, users of this material cannot do such
useful things as printing excerpts for each performer (with only his or
her songs), or transposing songs to more convenient keys.