Lawrence Golan Speaks about Golan v. Holder (Copyright before the Supreme Court)

Why would the government want to move so many items back under the copyright laws?  Makes no sense but then the GATT Treaty is making less sense as well.  This could bankrupt some orchestras around the Country and why we have the lawsuit.  Who stands to benefit from this is the question we would like answered.


Lawrence Golan Speaks about Golan v. Holder


The U.S. Supreme Court began hearing arguments Wednesday in Golan v. Holder, which argues against action taken by Congress to move thousands of works from the public domain back under copyright restrictions. It's not small beer in the copyright world. Google supports the challenge. The New York Times, Washington Post and others ran stories today.

In the New York Times piece, "Will Copyright Stifle Hollywood?" Peter Decherney, an associate professor of film studies at the University of Pennsylvania, makes arguments about film that are similar to what conductor Lawrence Golan, the lead plaintiff in Golan v. Holder, made about classical music when Rich Bailey interviewed him for Question Copyright.

Here is a lightly edited transcript of Lawrence Golan's comments. More to come as the case progresses.

Rich Bailey: Can you explain what's involved in this case? 

Lawrence Golan: Back in ’94 the GATT treaty was passed, also known as the Uruguay Roundtable Agreement. And essentially what it did was it took out of the public domain thousands and thousands if not millions of pieces of music that were in the public domain. To give you some examples of things that you would know: music by Shostakovich and Prokofiev and Stravinsky and some specific examples like Peter and the Wolf. That’s probably the most recognized piece that was taken out of public domain, although there were hundreds of thousands if not millions of others. 

And how that affects people in this country is as follows. 

First of all let me tell you how it works in general with procuring music for performance. Any symphony orchestra that wants to play a piece of music has to obtain the sheet music, the actual physical pieces of paper to be played on the music stands for all the members of the orchestra so that they can play the music, and of course there’s a score for the conductor who has all the parts. And for any given piece of music, there are essentially two possibilities. Either the piece is available for purchase or it’s not available for purchase and only available as a rental. 

Now the difference between the two is like this. If something’s available for purchase, an orchestra can buy the music. They buy all the parts, the score and the price varies but for a 10 to 15 minute piece the price might be $150 let’s say. And for a longer more substantial piece, an hour-long symphony maybe, the price would be up to $300 or so. And then the orchestra purchases the music, and it owns the music and can keep it in its library and perform it as frequently as it would like to without having to re-buy the music every time. It keeps the music and stores it in its library.   

Please visit questioncopyright.org for more of the interview.