

Musopen Wants to Give Classical Music to the Public Domain - nsantos
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/Musopen/record-and-release-free-music-without-copyrights

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michael_dorfman
_Right now, if you were to buy a CD of Beethoven's 9th symphony, you would not
be legally allowed to do anything but listen to it. You wouldn't be able to
share it, upload it, or use it as a soundtrack to your indie film- yet
Beethoven has been dead for 183 years and his music is no longer copyrighted._

Wow, talk about missing the point: Beethoven has been dead for 183 years, but
the musicians in the orchestra that recorded it certainly haven't been.

Having one random orchestra (even one with international renown) record the
works of Beethoven, and releasing those to the public domain will only help
people who want to re-use that single interpretation of the works in their
indie film.

The whole project seems to me to be of minimal value; what they're really
doing is hiring one orchestra to produce a very low budget version of some
classic works, so that some future group of people can avoid paying the
license costs for those (likely mediocre) versions.

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nsantos
I agree with your point, but I think it's an interesting project,
nevertheless. Mostly, I'd like to see if there really would be enough people
to make this happen. Also, chalk it up to morbid curiousity as to how good
their results would actually be; there doesn't seem to be any hints as to
which "internationally renown[ed]" orchestra they have their eye on.

In any case, the value of this project would be exactly how much people are
going to assign to it. If nothing else, maybe I'd end up with more legit music
in my collection. :)

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magic5227
the orchestra depends entirely on how much money we raise, and what pieces of
music the donors want. I can hire the london symphony, but I personally would
rather get something less well known and more music.

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magic5227
If you don't want to donate but want to help, we are also looking for votes
from our Pepsi Refresh grant

<http://www.refresheverything.com/musopen>

