Topic: Pirated music: good thing, bad thing or nothing?

[Cato]

There are performing editions of most plays and musicals that are not in the public domain - I doubt you would need to pay anyone anything to do Shakespeare, unless you ripped off a specific production's staging.  But for all current plays and musicals, you need to rent the edition which includes a licensing fee.  I am most familiar with the Music Theater International, which licenses musicals for regional and commercial theater productions.  There are other similar companies for plays.

Yes, even little grade-school productions offered to the public for free are supposed to pay that licensing fee: I know my current school pays such a fee for its presentations (e.g. Willy Wonka, Seussical the Musical, etc.)

[(poco) Sforzando]

Hamlet is a good example here: there are of course 3 primary sources (1st "bad" Quarto, 2nd Quarto, 1st Folio), and every editor's opinions are different, so any edition by an editor who has been dead for less than 70 years, or any new edition published in the US after 1923, cannot be legally copied.

But editorial work on Shakespeare is much more than deciding whether to choose between "this too too solid flesh" or "this too too sullied flesh." It includes annotations, variants, an introduction, etc. Most texts of Hamlet today silently conflate the 2nd Quarto and 1st Folio, though the Arden publishes these separately and the 1st Quarto as well. For performing purposes, however, a director is free to use whichever text he/she wants, and that generally includes making cuts - since it's rare to see the full text performed on stage.

[San Antone]

I was not talking about current, copyrighted works, for which a royalty is obviously required. I was asking about performing Shakespeare using a copyrighted text. And to the best of my knowledge there is no copyright attached to a staging of any dramatic work.

I doubt it, or every high school in the US would be a violator - which I doubt is the case.  As far as stagings - it is an interesting question.  Choreography, for example, can be under protection, but I do not know about sets, lighting, and other details of a production. 

[(poco) Sforzando]

I doubt it, or every high school in the US would be a violator - which I doubt is the case.  As far as stagings - it is an interesting question.  Choreography, for example, can be under protection, but I do not know about sets, lighting, and other details of a production.

If you subscribe to the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/theater/newsandfeatures/29gree.html?pagewanted=all

And if you don't:
http://www.dramatistsguild.com/media/PDFs/PlaywrightinCourt.pdf

[San Antone]

If you subscribe to the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/theater/newsandfeatures/29gree.html?pagewanted=all

And if you don't:
http://www.dramatistsguild.com/media/PDFs/PlaywrightinCourt.pdf

Interesting, and enlightening; thanks for sharing the article. 

[Madiel]

Is this site legal?

http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page

IMSLP do a very good job of emphasising that they focus on what is legal in Canada and do not make any promises about legality elsewhere. They in fact highlight those cases where something that is out of copyright in Canada might still be in copyright in another country.