GLAM/Newsletter/November 2020/Contents/Germany report
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German symphony orchestra releases audio samples under free license
First-ever release of freely-licensed professional orchestral recordings marks project milestone
The Frankfurt Radio Symphony has released ten audio samples from its 90-year history under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. The recordings are believed to be the first-ever professional recordings of orchestral music to be released under a Creative Commons license. They are already in use on both the English and German-language Wikipedias in the articles about the orchestra, its present and past conductors, and the articles about the featured works and their the composers.
The release marks another milestone for the ongoing "Wiki Loves Broadcast" collaboration between the German Wikipedia community and German public broadcasting stations. The project's biggest success to date has been the release of 50 high-quality history and science explainer videos from TV documentaries in June 2020. A number of both informal and formal meetings and roundtables has shown increased readiness by publicly-funded broadcasting stations to release both historic and current material under a free license, with the possibility of commercial re-use being the biggest barrier.
Lack of professional recordings keeps Wikipedia silent
Until this release, there had been extremely few recordings of classical music on Wikipedia, with articles such as the biography of Richard Wagner or the entry about Swan Lake restricted to text and images only, even though the copyright in these works has long lapsed (with amateur productions or historic recordings full of static noise making rare exceptions). Also, articles describing instruments like the French Horn or terms such as baroque music remain without sound. Since 2017, the "Wiki Loves Music" project has been working on filling this gap.
The ten audio samples released by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, ranging from an excerpt of a 1935 recording of a rarely-performed 19th-century opera to a the opening bars of Antonin Dvořák's world-known symphony From the New World recorded in 2018 can be found on Wikimedia Commons.
First ever
The U.S. Marine Symphony Orchestra has released recordings. Being works of the United States Government, I would assume their recordings are in the public domain, subject of course to any underlying copyrights of the music itself.
I guess technically being in the public domain isn't the same as being released under a free license but it's close enough. Davidwr (talk) 17:05, 29 November 2020 (UTC)
- Thanks, Davidwr, you are correct that the U.S. Marine Symphony Orchestra's performances do qualify as "government works" under U.S. copyright law in certain circumstances, but the U.S. Marine Corps have never released any recordings under a free license. This is relevant because their works are technically only in the public domain in the United States, and remain protected by copyright in other countries. --Gnom (talk) 17:32, 29 November 2020 (UTC)
- w:Musopen did this many years ago. I don't think the superlative is valid in this case. (not watching, please
{{ping}}) czar 23:56, 6 December 2020 (UTC)
- Thanks for this comment. From what I understand, Musopen had bought a number of recordings and released them into the public domain in 2012, but with the orchestra remaining anonymous, if my understanding is correct. --Gnom (talk) 14:04, 12 December 2020 (UTC)