Harvard University professor F. Michael Scherer discussed the evolution of copyright laws from royal privilege to the predecessor of the modern American laws yesterday at Harvard.
Scherer was among a small group of composers at Harvard’s Barker Center yesterday afternoon when he discussed the development of copyright law in the late-18th to mid-19th century and the contributions musical composers have made to refine it.
The copyright originated in England and France, the countries where classical musicians such as Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach first encountered primitive publishing and ownership developments.
“In the beginning, there was the royal monopoly … the royal privilege,” Scherer said.
Bach, a renowned classical musical composer, was among a handful of musicians who first used the so-called “royal privilege” in the late-18th century, a primitive law foreshadowing the copyright used widely in England and France. However, Scherer said, the royal privilege proved to be imperfect because it infringed on the ownership rights of the composer and imposed control by the publishing house.
Bach then took his publishing house to the British high court and won his victory over the publisher’s control. The royal privilege, Scherer added, was reasonably successful only in France.
Later on, Scherer said, a number of classical composers, including Ludwig von Beethoven, petitioned and observed music publishers were “getting fat by robbing musicians” of money and ownership of their compositions. This unfair treatment by musicians, he continued, worsened the balance of trade and payments among composers and publishers.
These laws, Scherer said, affected Europe in the 1800s, and therefore restricted any publication of foreign music. Scherer said in addition to these laws, each country within Europe attempted to stay within its own territory to avoid any conflict.
After the royal privilege, the Law of Anne took the place as the dominant copyright law for printers, Scherer said.
“The first formal copyright law was the Law of Anne,” Scherer explained. “It was enacted in 1709 … Initially, it was held not to cover music.”
The court later recognized the Law of Anne, which then applied to music as well as printed works, Scherer said.
Scherer provided an oral timeline of several dates in history that further refined the copyright. Among these dates, from 1777 on, London and Paris proved to be centers of musical production and copyright development, he said.
The primitive Law of Anne, Scherer said, proved to be imperfect and flawed. Many composers and writers assumed “one had to publish first in England in order to receive British copyright,” he said.
This proved to become a problem between territories surrounding England and France, he said. By the 1840s, he said, the copyright was spread throughout much of Europe.
By the end of the lecture, Scherer discussed the growing conflict between the publisher and the composers of musical works. While publishers wanted to appeal to a large market, composers wanted to publish for a limited number of people, Scherer said.
Toward the end of the 19th century, publishers instituted an incentive for composers to write more and created a “definite gradation of works,” Scherer said.
Scherer ended the lecture by discussing the questionable responsibility of the publisher and the financial dependency of the musical composer. He focused on the emergence and development of the copyright, emphasizing more on its origins than the present effects of the Internet and continuous loss of financial ownership for musical composers today.
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