Odds are Prokofiev’s picaresque Peter and the Wolf was one of your memorable early experiences of live ensemble music. Shockingly, your kids may not enjoy that same opportunity after yesterday’s disastrous ruling in a case involving international orchestral music and other foreign works removed from the public domain:
In 1994 Congress changed U.S. copyright law to conform with an international copyright agreement. The new law reapplied copyright to millions of works that had long been free for anyone to use without permission.
Mr. Golan had argued that taking works back out of the public domain would hinder creativity by making artists more cautious about remixing or otherwise using works, fearing their status could change in the future in a way that required payment to copyright holders. More broadly, academics have expressed concern that upholding the 1994 law would make it much more difficult to write books or assemble course readings without having to deal with a host of legal hurdles – or just prohibitively expensive fees – to avoid violating copyrights.
The decision – in which intellectual property rights holders won big over orchestras, performing arts organizations, creatives and scholars – likely means that a generation’s worth of cultural treasures will become less accessible to the broader public.
And we pay taxes for this? First Congress through legislation and now the Supreme Court in this ruling: Keeping us safe, apparently, from the likes of Prokofiev and Shostakovich.
