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.

Filed Under: beggars' opera, copyright, johann christoph pepusch, john gay