Monday, October 30, 2006

You are charged with using an episema

In the course of my copyright investigations, I wrote to the Meinrad abbey to find out the basis for the claim made in the Meinrad neume font package that the ictus and episema is copyrighted by Solesmes, and therefore you risk prosecution if you put a tiny line under a note or above a note of your own creation without permission of Solesmes (as silly as that might sound!). In any case, I did receive an answer, which I thought I should pass on:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: @saintmeinrad.edu]
Sent: Sunday, October 29, 2006 6:22 PM
To: jatucker@mindspring.com

Subject: episema and ictus


...According to Solesmes it is possible to copyright a symbol in Europe, and they had copyrighted the ictus and episema. However they no longer insist on that, but I am not sure why. So you don’t have to worry about it these days.

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