IMSLP Forums

A transcription for piano 2 hands was published by Schirmer in 1950, but Sandor (a colleague and champion of Bartok's music, as you may know) died 2005. Is this eligible for upload to IMSLP?

Nope... transcriptions have full copyright, so it won't be PD until 2056.

The only possibility would be if Schirmer failed to renew the copyright in 1978. Since Schirmer was the publisher, it falls under US copyright - which means that they have no recourse to NIE's if they failed to renew. This is quite unlikely to have happened, of course. However, 1978 was back in the era when Schirmer was a subsidiary of Macmillan - a book publisher. They tended to be sloppy about such things back then, so it might be worth a search through the records at the copyright office website.

Interestingly, this isn't actually in the Stanford Copyright Renewal Database... but I'm not entirely sure about the scope of the database; it says it covers "books" (class A), but does that include scores?

Renewed on 12 May 1978 (RE-3-118). Here's a link http://www.copyright.gov/records/cohm.html to the copyright office database, which is good for works published from 1950-1963 only. pre-1950 publications of music (Class E) are not covered by the Stanford database. Renewals of pre-1923 publications are irrelevant because they are public domain even if renewed. For music, the 1923-1949 publications are the real pain. No online records of any sort for music - and good luck trying to find printed volumes of the Catalog of Copyright Entries.

Nice! I've been looking for that link for some time. Thanks! By the way, someone uploaded the Piazzolla tangos... I waded through the copyright office link, but can only find copyright renewal for one of the tangos... are the rest pd? Or I guess renewed before 1950? If you think they are not pd, you can just delete the file (or if its too much trouble to find out)

http://imslp.org/wiki/Image:Piazzolla_- ... _(pno).pdf