“You could interview any of a thousand living composers and ask them, ‘One-hundred years from now, if you had a choice between your music being under copyright and not being played versus in the public domain and being played all over the world,’" says Lawrence Golan, "I guarantee all composers would say they want their music heard.” Photo: Wayne Armstrong
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear Golan v. Holder, a case concerning copyright law, this fall. DU music Professor Lawrence Golan is the lead plaintiff in the case, which claims that current U.S. copyright law has made it prohibitively expensive for smaller orchestras to perform copyrighted music.
It used to be that artists lost copyright protection of their work after a number of years, and the work would enter the public domain, where anyone could purchase reproduction rights for a one-time nominal fee. Public domain allowed arts groups of all sizes to perform, display or reproduce that artwork as often as they wanted. When the United States signed on to the Berne Convention — an international treaty that protects the copyrights of literary and artistic works essentially forever — in 1989, many pieces of music, paintings, books and films that had been in the public domain regained copyright protection, meaning that anyone wanting to perform, display or publish a work must pay fees and receive permission from the original artist or his or her descendants to present that work.
Golan, who also serves as conductor of the Lamont Symphony Orchestra, says that in the case of a musical work, reinstating copyright protection means paying an average of $500 each time an artist or group wants to perform a work by a composer whose work was previously in the public domain, such as Prokofiev, Shostakovich or Stravinsky.
The Golan lawsuit, which challenges current copyright law, has gone through the federal District Court and the 10th Circuit Appeals Court system twice during the past 10 years.
“Composers live to have their music heard,” Golan says. “You could interview any of a thousand living composers and ask them, ‘One-hundred years from now, if you had a choice between your music being under copyright and not being played versus in the public domain and being played all over the world,’ I guarantee all composers would say they want their music heard.”