4 ms·
Oh my god this attitude absolutely infuriates me. I just assisted my kids’ piano teacher in organizing an online virtual piano festival. The technical piece was
by ipython 7y ago
Oh my god this attitude absolutely infuriates me. I just assisted my kids’ piano teacher in organizing an online virtual piano festival. The technical piece was easy- set up a google form where students could submit their information and a video of their performance.
The hard part? In an in person festival, the student hands their sheet music to the judge sitting in the room before performing, so the judge can track and note any deviation between the music and the performance.
We wanted a similar experience online, so our local festival organizers reached out to the wonderful music publishers licensing lawyers. Their response was wholly unhelpful. They wanted to make SO certain that in this pandemic their precious sheet music for elementary school age kids was NOT stolen. They wanted measures such as pasting a “used with permission” watermark on any picture of the music, purchasing a separate copy for the judges, and ensuring secure erase of any files after the festival!
It was absolutely insane. This sort of inflexible attitude in a time of crisis makes me irrationally angry. If we had any way to avoid purchasing music from these .... people ... I would do it in a heartbeat.
- logicallee 7y agoDid they want money too? How much?
- ipython 7y agoI don't know, we ended up just eliminating the sheet music from the judging of the festival because it was just too much to figure out in a compressed timeframe.
- derefr 7y agoI guess the implication is that the exact approach you were originally taking in the in-person version of the festival, wouldn’t have been allowed by the IP authors if you’d have asked them. Which is a great reason to just boycott their works, get every piano school to stop using them, and thus starve them of all royalties.
- ipython 7y agoI agree but these clubs of piano teachers are very conservative (in the meaning that they don't want to rock the boat) and it's hard to get the sort of collective action required to effectively economically boycott these publishers....
- wbl 7y agoDon't most violin students play pieces from before 1923?
- kemotep 7y agoThe arrangements can and do have a separate copyright that the publishers own.
- scrollaway 7y agoIf you reached out to "licensing lawyers", this is wholly unsurprising. Their entire job is to be overprotective, both during normal times and during exceptional times. The client's job is to recognize that and sidestep them once in a while, of course. Especially during exceptional times.