IMSLP Forums

To be clear, Sallen112, a new edition today would likely not actually qualify for US copyright if it ended up in court: see http://www.rbs2.com/cmusic2.pdf. However, because the copyright office in the US will register whatever you send them for a copyright, we wouldn't accept a new edition as we don't want to actually fight that sort of battle. Arguably, all Urtext editions (and probably many editorial editions) should be public domain in the United States; we just don't tag them that way.

The copy does not need to be free of errors or small editorial changes to be in the public domain in the US. See the document I linked above.

One of the problems with this is that intellectual property laws in US are unique in certain respects and differ materially from those in most other countries. Over the years, the 70 year rule has increasingly been adopted as the norm (although it varies in some details from country to country) but, until and unless US decides to harmonise with this, it will remain in an anomalous position in this regard.

The 70 year rule was only adopted in UK relatively recently, before which a 50 year rule applied; that change meant that works by such composers as Elgar, Delius and Holst entered the public domain on 1 January 1985 only to return, upon implementation of the revised law, to copyright status until 1 January 2005.

In the case of Sorabji, only around 12% of his scores were published during the period in which US copyright is currently not applicable and, for the record, many of his works written up to 1925 were unpublished until we came into being and published them from the 1980s onwards.

As mentioned previously elsewhere, the scores published up to that date were replete with errors (some more so than others). Gradually, new typeset editions of them are being created which aim to correct these; several have already been issued and some of the remainder are in progress. We have found that, as soon as such new editions become available, interest in and consequent demand for the original publications wanes. Assuming that such editions do not qualify as public domain in US, their existence appears to change the overall status of those works in US from public domain to copyright to the extent that, whilst the original publications are regarded as public domain there, the new editions are not.

If a new typeset of these works are done, for USA copyright if it has significant new musical changes or a brand new engraving, then yes it would be under copyright in the USA because then that edition would act as its first publication of that particular edition with the new additions. The original edition would still be PD-USA no matter what.