> Pianos from hundreds of years ago didn't play exactly like a modern piano, so there may have been an intermediary step where the original piece was modified to work on a modern piano when the sheet music went to print.
This is preposterous.
This is preposterous.
A specific arrangement of words, music, or light (in the case of film) are well protected. Painting & sculpture, perhaps less so; fashion, dance, and architecture, sweet fuck all. Which all have as much if not more creative input than an arrangement.
How I think they should be handled? Same as fashion or architecture, only direct copies in the same format are protected, everything else is derivative.
Transcription takes time and effort. Time and effort equals a copyright.
If it were at all common, copyright would cease to function. E.g. someone could, in theory, write Romeo and Juliet word-for-word from their own imagination and then apply for a copyright. How on earth would enforcement work? There's no distinction between the copyright-free Shakespeare version and the newly copyrighted version, so do performers get to choose which version they're acting under?
If you're concluding copyright is impossibly complicated, vague, and confusing and the only reason the system works at all is because hashing out the details in court is either a nuclear option between two large companies, or enforcement on a large scale against small actors is basically impossible (but will unpredictably come down like a ton of bricks on some unlucky individuals), then you'd be right!