The Hermeneutic of Continuity

Photo by Chris Light Jeffrey Tucker, Sacred Music correspondent for the New Liturgical Movement, is understandably thrilled to see that the Archabbey of St Meinrad in Indiana is making its music available in pdf form free of charge on the internet with an explicit Creative Commons licence. If you wish to buy a printed copy of one of the books, you can do so. St Meinrad have chosen to publish their books via Lulu . There you can see that some works are still only available as e-books (with a small charge) but the monks are committed to making them all available for free download in due course as and when they are able to prepare them. The music that St Meinrad is offering is properly liturgical music - Gregorian chant - adapted for the English texts. I know that some musicians would argue that Gregorian chant is not suited for the English language and that other styles of sacred music might be better - or some other way of adapting Gregorian chant, or something. I'm not qualified...

Jeffrey Tucker at the NLM has done a good job of explaining what a Creative Commons licence is and why it is necessary for Catholics to use such licences, especially (though not exclusively for musical works: Creative Commons for Catholics .

Jeffrey Tucker at the NLM has for some time been leading the opposition to ICEL's policy on copyright. Yesterday he kept the momentum going with a fine post: Religion and Royalties on Ritual Texts . He argues that the texts of the Mass should be put into the public domain "immediately and without qualification." I entirely agree with him.

Jeffrey Tucker has an important post today on a matter which he has consistently highlighted: copyright of liturgical texts. In this case it is the Revised Grail Psalter which is to be the official text for the psalms used in the English Liturgy in the USA. See: Grail Psalms: A Path Forward . Way back in the 1960s, the Grail (a group of lay women in England) gave over the rights to the Grail Psalter to Harper Collins. The rights to the US revision are in the hands of GIA, also a "for profit" company. Jeffrey is spot-on when he says: The Grail used a copyright convention at the time to retain exclusive rights to them, and they handed them over to the publishing giant HarperCollins to manage the rights. In those days, not much thought was put into the problems of treating the Mass as the “intellectual property” of a private entity. Everyone was dependent on the mainstream publishers. There was no means of digital delivery. Even photocopies were cumbersome. But all that began to...

The text of the new translation of the Ordinary of the Mass is available at the USCCB website . At the moment, this is a pdf. I wonder whether anyone has already stripped the text out to post it in more straightforwardly. There is a good discussion on copyright in the article The new ICEL translation and Creative Commons options at Cantemus Domino. Jeffrey Tucker has written to ICEL as follows: I know of 10 composers who have already worked on new settings of the new Mass text. In doing this, they are responding to Cardinal Arinze's hope that having the texts available will "facilitate the devising of musical settings for the parts of the Mass." They would like to post these compositions online for free download for everyone. Your copyright notice does not seem to specify whether they are permitted to do this without paying ICEL. Can you please provide me a public and clear answer to this question? The first answer that he received asked for the names of the websites an...

Occasionally, I get requests in the comment box from people asking to use things from this blog. to save having to reply to each individual request, I have now added a "Creative Commons" licence on the sidebar. Basically, you are free to copy or quote things from this blog (including my own photographs) provided that you give attribution. A link in the form "Hat Tip (or H/T) Hermeneutic of Continuity is fine.

There is an excellent post on NLM today by Michael Lawrence entitled The Complete Works of Bach--for free .As it is quite short, I will post it in full: Not far from my computer desk is a boring little book on copyright law as it applies to musicians. I've never read it, and I don't intend to read this heap of positivism. My hope is that within my lifetime most of it will become irrelevant, as intellectual property laws often hurt creators rather than help them. We are making progress. One need look no further than the Choral Public Domain Library. But there is more. Many artists themselves are catching on to the reality that if they offer something for free, the sales of that item and the general benefit to them increases sharply, most famously the band Radio Head, which released its most recent album online in a pay-what-you-wish format. Following in Radio Head's footsteps is Dr. James Kibbie of the University of Michigan, who is in the midst of recording the complete or...

Earlier this month, I mentioned that the RSV Catholic edition of the Bible was online. Thank goodness it is! Today I noticed via John Three Sixteen that the Virginia etext version of the non-Catholic RSV has now been removed because of the assertion of copyright by the NCCCUSA: We regret that we are unable to host the Revised Standard Version of the Bible on our website any longer. We were recently contacted by the National Council of Churches of Christ ( http://www.ncccusa.org/ ), who own the copyright for the Revised Standard Version of the Bible in the USA. They have asked us to remove the text from our website, and we have complied with their request. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. The NCCCUSA owns the copyright to the RSV and the NRSV. It has a page for its Permissions Policy which seems to rule out the possibility of anyone publishing the texts online. On the Bible menu page, it says: The Bible Translation and Utilization program ministry seeks: to encour...