It seems to me that the fate of publishing revenues is the same as that of recording revenues. Most musicians these days make their living from live performances (I know I do). Recordings and (at least in the case of popular music) printed music primarily serves as promotional material now. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

You’re right about this if and only if the person who is trading away the legally downloaded copy completely deletes it from their own computer. I’ve done this with music that I’ve downloaded from iTunes to give as a gift, but came to realize it’s a lot easier to just give an iTunes gift card. The girl in JRB’s post wasn’t doing this, as she indicated that she didn’t have access to a credit card to legally download the song she wanted. If you buy a CD and give it away, there’s still just one CD. That’s the difference between physical merchandise and digital downloads.

@Molly,

Didn’t someone once say that a conservative is a liberal who got mugged? Don’t start on the politics (off topic!), but this is just to say that it’s only natural to start getting concerned about this when you suddenly find you can’t pay your bills because people are copying your stuff instead of paying for it.

I guest-lecture on this topic at my school, and in every class there are jaws on the floor. Some of these kids just never even considered that someone else was losing their livelihood from it.

Yes, I did see – and enjoyed – your post.

True, this is a digression from Jerry’s original question, but it relates to the mindset of the teenager Mr. Brown mentioned in his blog post. She was incredulous that what she was doing would be considered stealing. Why? Because popular culture has reinforced that mindset.

It isn’t couched as stealing if you’re on Glee or if you’re Jay-Z, so why should teenagers think that they ought to pay $4 for Mr. Brown’s sheet music?

Did you see Christina Mulligan’s piece on this issue? I was glad to read it:

Copyright: The Elephant in the Middle of the Glee Club

I put up a post about it, but, um, we got a little sidetracked…

With respect, there’s a lot of scanning of sheet music on P2P that doesn’t fall under fair use. If I borrow or buy a copy of a piece of sheet music, I’m not allowed to share copies of it with others. I’ve acquired it for my own use. It doesn’t matter whether it’s traded or not; under current law, that type of arrangement isn’t fair use.

Like David, I currently give away scores of my own music liberally. I haven’t seen any of them floating around on P2P networks, but right now I’d be more than okay with my music being shared in this fashion. That said, if a publisher or record company were to take my scores on, and we were to invest in promoting them for sale, I’d probably feel very differently about my work being shared on P2P networks.

I don’t know the full details of the Brown “traders,” but if in fact someone is trading a piece of sheet music which someone once legally downloaded for another piece of sheet music which was once upon a time legally downloaded–there is nothing illegal about that. And if someone trades or even pays for what is essentially used merchandise–the composer has not legally lost a cent. Peer-to-peer networking is not quite the same thing because it is possible to download tons of things for free without giving anything back. But if there was a strict one-item-uploaded-for-one-item-downloaded rule, it would appear to be protected under the current copyright laws which don’t apply to vendors of used items.

For starters, like the last time this topic appeared here, just a few months ago, the composer who was indignant about file sharing of his scores was someone about whom, in all honesty, I’d never heard. Same with the person mentioned above-never heard of him. I’m sure he’s a nice person, and perhaps a good composer and all that. But I doubt very much that he’s lost much income from his scores being downloaded, and probably gained in market awareness, etc. I can’t prove any of this, of course, but we live in a digital age. This is no longer a world where one goes to Patelson’s or Schirmer’s to peruse and purchase scores or merely borrow them from a library in Lincoln Center or its equivalent elsewhere. Patelson’s is long gone. Does Schirmer’s even exist as a store in NYC? The fact that they’re gone is more evidence that the center of gravity for music scores has shifted to the online world. There are many avenues to post one’s scores and derive revenue that this person could take advantage of. I’m not sure how his scores got pirated, since they would have had to have been posted somewhere as PDFs and distributed, and I can’t see how that would have happened without his own intervention.

So to me, this is a nonissue. If folks want to derive revenue from their scores (or at least subscribe to the delusion that income exists through selling scores of anything that doesn’t involve a lot of musicians required for a single performance, like chorus music), there are online stores to do just that. For folks like me who don’t give a damn and are just happy anyone is actually willing and/or intoxicated enough to download and look at our scores, we give it away online through our own sites, the imslp.org site, etc. Like Paul said, we can have both.

How sad.