Would The Beggars' Opera Be Possible Today?
from the doing-the-math dept
Mockingbird writes "John Gay's 1728 musical comedy The Beggar's Opera made use of 69 popular melodies, none of which was written by Gay or by his musical editor Johann Christoph Pepusch. I've attempted a back-of-the-envelope calculation to determine whether Gay could have produced his play had today's long copyright terms been in force in 1728. Conclusion: It depends, but the clearance fees would likely not have been trivial under reasonable assumptions."Of course, I'm sure the usual folks will show up in the comments insisting that if he couldn't write all the music himself, it wasn't worth making.
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Filed Under: beggars' opera, copyright, johann christoph pepusch, john gay
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Of course it wasn't worth making
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You got the department wrong
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Re: You got the department wrong
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Re: You got the department wrong
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Re: Re: You got the department wrong
Perhaps thats the solution - any performer wanting to use other performers works at all just needs to state they are a comedian rather than a singer "you don't get the joke? not my fault - I never said I was a GOOD comedian"
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Copyrights gone wild
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LOL
That is quite the presumption.
P.S. If he couldn't write the music himself, it wasn't worth making.
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It's always worth making - it's just a question of is anyone willing to pay? Basically, he could pay the fees required and have a nice day, or he could not and get nowhere.
It all depends. If he could get $400 a seat and sell lots of t-shirts, well, who knows? It could be a profitable enterprise.
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longest running Broadway play
but isn't taking a melody and incorporating it into a larger work with a stage production, acting and i'm sure some amount of original musical input make it a transformative use of the music?
sounds like fair use to me, we're talking melody lines not entire songs getting ripped right?
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In order to put it in the correct perspective...
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