IMSLP Forums

Hey guys, I'm waiting very anxiously for the liberation of the Franz Berwald's symphonies here. Is there any copyright problems with it? I don't think so, since the composer died in 1845. If someone knows something about it, I'd be glad to hear it.

Thank you very much,

This issue has been explained several times already in the forums, and there's an explanation also on Berwald's discussion page on the wiki. Here's the short version:

Most of the Berwald titles on the site are from the critical edition published by Baerenreiter starting in the 1960s. Although critical (urtext) editions more than 25 years old are public domain in Germany and in Canada (due to a failure to meet a threshold of originality to qualify as an "adaptation"), their copyright status is not at all clear in the USA - which is the source of a large majority of IMSLP's traffic. (Such editions are entitled to no more than 30 years from publication in the EU itself, and only 20 years from publication in Italy.)

Although there have been two important US court decisions (Feist v. Rural and Bridgeman v. Corel) whose definitions of the "threshold of originality" set the bar quite high, there has been no court case directly addressing the copyright status of critical editions of music. Thus, we are forced to go along with whatever claim a publisher wishes to make. Under the strict, literal interpretation of US copyright law, a 1966 copyright claim will be valid until Jan. 1, 2062 (95 years from publication), while works published after 1977 are protected for 70 years after the last surviving editor dies.

Until there is a clarification of this issue in US courts, we have no choice but to block access to all such files that are not public domain in the USA. We are working very hard to find a way to permit those outside the USA to access these files, but it will take some tiime, sad to say.

Thank you for explaining this to me, Carolus, I really haven't seen any previous discussion about these Berwald scores. Well, then I hope to be alive until 2062.