Page:Copyright, Its History And Its Law (1912).djvu/249

 ' or ' dynamophone,' in which musical compositions will be translated to the ear without the interposition even of a cylinder or disc sound-record ; and it seems a common-sense inference that the musical composer should have as full rights in this as in other forms of copying or reproducing his thought. Buda-Pesth is said to have not only a telephone 'newspaper,' but a system of reading novels and other works of literature to telephone subscribers, and if this should reach such proportions as substantially to reduce the sale of the printed copies of a new novel from which the author would receive benefit, it would also seem a common-sense inference that the same or an equivalent royalty should be paid him.

"In music writing or notation there are two and only two essentials: relative vertical position, showing pitch, and relative horizontal position, showing duration of notes. The earliest form of our present music writing is the system of the 'large,' 'long,' 'breve' and 'semi-breve' notes, in which the pitch was shown by the vertical relations of the notes, and the length of the note by the length of the black mark, the 'large' mark being twice the length of the 'long' mark. This corresponds closely to the perforated music roll of to-day, which could be read by a practiced eye with and probably without staff lines, to the extent that if every other form of reproduction were destroyed, the melody and harmony of a musical work could be reproduced into the ordinary notation of music writing. I speak from personal knowledge of these music rolls, having had a mechanical instrument for some years. The different kinds of rolls differ in the relative spacing and in distance from the edge of the roll, which gives the standard, but a foreshortened photograph of any, bringing them to the same scale, would pattern closely the