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Comment by ronyeh | Hacker News Reader

To do it in the most legal way possible....

Look up the 1924 public domain arrangement in sheet music form.

Copy those notes into Musescore or an alternative.

Export the notes into MIDI.

Use Pianoteq to play the MIDI file. (It's one of the better sounding virtual instruments out there.) You can export a WAV file from Pianoteq.

Use this WAV file in your documentary on YouTube.

Prepare to get content ID'd by one of the big publishers anyways. You will have to defend the claim with proof that your audio is in the public domain.

I'm not a lawyer, but I happen to know a little about music licensing.

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(IANAL) Also since your "work" will likely have some copyright since it itself a derivative work, I would go with the CC0 license so that others can use your work without fear of infringement of _your_ rights. https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc...

"CC0 helps solve this problem by giving creators a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law. CC0 is a universal instrument that is not adapted to the laws of any particular legal jurisdiction, similar to many open source software licenses. And while no tool, not even CC0, can guarantee a complete relinquishment of all copyright and database rights in every jurisdiction, we believe it provides the best and most complete alternative for contributing a work to the public domain given the many complex and diverse copyright and database systems around the world."

"Metropolitan Museum of Art: All public domain images in its collection are shared under CC0, which expanded their digital collection by over 375,000 images as well as provided data on over 420,000 museum objects spanning more than 5,000 years. Through the power of the commons, billions of people are now able to enjoy the beauty of the Met’s collections as well as participate in the continued growth of the commons, utilizing the infrastructure that makes greater collaboration possible." https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/policies-and-documen...

His audio, a new recording, would NOT be public domain. But it would be HIS.

There is a vital difference between copyright of the written music and any particular recording of said music.

Yes, but then you as an author can choose to place your own performance in the public domain.

I thought that wasn't clearly established. I believe the assumption has been that you could call something public domain, and obviously people do so, but I don't believe it has been tested in court.

Not that I can see an obvious reason why it would be so tested, and frankly these are fuzzy memories from 15-20 years ago.

To what extent it is obvious just a simple statement that something is public domain would work depends on jurisdiction, which is why things like CC0 [1] exists.

[1] https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode

Yes you are correct. The audio recording any person generates through the procedure I outlined above is now copyrighted by that person, who may then choose to place it in the public domain.

It's like if I recorded myself playing Für Elise. The recording I generate is owned by me, unless I release it to the public domain.

This isn't true. Replaying public domain music through mechanical means adds no creativity to the work, and thus has no copyrightable elements.

For reference: this was specified in article 14 of the new EU copyright directive. One of the few good changes in it: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

The type and timbre of the instrument used, the speed and volume of playback, any post-processing decisions, etc. are all creative choices and thus can make a resulting work copyrightable.

Be careful using generic music from the Internet.

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