Copyright text appears on every page

The reason copyright text appears on every page is because under (European) copyright law the page is not protected without. It must also contain the © symbol.

If you just put your copyright information on the title page, only that will be protected and your music will be free for all to do with as they will - not a good idea!

I'm not sure when it came in, all I can say is that all the modern editions I have have a copyright notice at the bottom of each page, but older editions don't.

Maybe it came in when they upped the time period from 50 to 70 years?

You can always leave it blank in the Create Score dialogue and then enter it as Frame Text on the title page.

First, the technical aspect:

I believe copyright text is automatically make part of the footer in 2.0, but if you want to override that, you should be able to simply edit the footer to remove it, and add it to the first page manually. I suppose the real fix is to have a separate "first page footer", as opposed to just an option to control whether the footer is displayed at all.

Second,. the legal aspect:

My understanding of the law is from a US perspective and is somewhat outdated, but might be useful anyhow. In the US, it *used to be* the case that works with no visible copyright notice were in danger of not being protected (although the actual law wasn't stated quite so plainly). In most of the rest of the world, this was not the case, most countries had long abided by the Berne Convention, which established certain groundrules for copyright law, including the stipulation that a visible notice *not* be required for protection. For this and other reasons, the US had long stayed out of the Berne Convention, but joined in 1988, at which point almost all countries had very similar laws, and copyright notices were *not* required in order to gain protection.

However, over the past few years in the US, there has been push for changes in the law under the guise of the term "orphan works". The idea being that for many works with no copyright notice, it is very difficult to establish copyright status or even who to contact to find out, so in the absence of readily available information to the contrary, people should be allowed to assume works are public domain and use them accordingly. Or at least, the penalties for using a work without permission should be very much lessened if you can reasonably claim you couldn't figure out who the copyright owner was or if it was still under protection. Over the past 5 years or so, a number of bills have come up to attempt to code something like this into law. So far, nothing much has come of these efforts - no major new laws. However, a lot of people are taking preemptive steps to protect their works by adding copyright messages in places where they otherwise might not have, like on every page.

My guess is that the EU is going or has gone through something similar. A quick perusal of Wikipedia under the term "orphan works" suggests that it is very similar - no substantive change to law since the Berne Convention, but publishers are taking no chances and are adding more copyright messages just in case the law changes some day..

Bottom line: whether or not the law in any given country actually *requires* notices on every page (and I think this is *extremely* doubtful - I'd like to see the text of any such law!) - people are doing it for fear that some day, someone will do something with page 3 or their work and claim they didn't know it was "copyrighted" because they never saw page 1, and thus that page should qualify as an "orphan work".

I've just run into this problem of the copyright message going onto every page. What's the point of $C and $c if the MS censor is then to decide on what pages the copyright should go?
Anyway:
(a) I've got a filing cabinet or two full of music - some of it recent and published in EU - and nowhere can I find a score or book with the copyright on every page;
(b) If I've composed my own stuff, I like to put (or not put) a suitable copyright message where I choose - on the front page of the music, or even on a cover.
So here we go - best to ignore footers and use vertical frames for this, I think.

Style/General ...> Header, Footer, Numbers: hold the pointer stopped on a box to see the options:

If this is what you are looking for ...

To be clear: use $C in the footer if you wish the copyright to appear on the first page only. Using vertical frames is a bad workaround - you won't be able to get the message into the margin, and if the layout of the score changes for any reason, that frame could end up somewhere other than the bottom of the page. The footer facility with $C really does work.

I did use $C. It didn't work. It gave me the copyright on every page (or on pages 1 & 3 out of 4, to be precise). Obviously I tried $c also - no difference. But I'll try it on another score, or mess about a bit more, and see what happens.

I understand the problems associated with getting and keeping a vertical frame at the bottom of a page. I've managed to get a whole-page frame immediately in front of an existing title frame; and also one immediately after a section break and before an existing frame. It took brain surgery to do these things, of course. If one adds two full-page frames at the start of a score, one can have a double-sided front cover, but this renders the footer feature useless, because MuseScore takes the cover as page 1, not the first page of the music.

If you can locate a score where $C does not work, feel free to post it so we can take a look. As for cover pages, consider using a page layout / desktop publishing program for that and then loading a PDF version of your score into there.

THanks for the info Marc.

You can tel MuseScore where to start page numbering, and that start could be negative resulting in no numerous shown for page numbers below 1, and I think also in shifting the $C to the page with the number 1

Thanks, Marc. I've had years of using Overture and creating cover pages, indexes, etc. in Word or Open Office. I've used Fineprint & pdfFactory for assembling multi-source documents etc.. But I'd just love to be able to get everything in one document for a change, instead of having 3 or 4 documents for a piece. MuseScore is proving quite illuminating - the ability to join existing scores into one looks set to be crucial for a current project.

Yes, page numbering can start late, but if you want to embellish the page number by (say) dashes, e.g. - $p - , then the dashes appear before page 1, and it seems they can't be hidden by placing a blank graphic over them. (The footer starts at the beginning, not at the chosen page 1).

Marc: I've just uploaded a second version of Come Live With Me, which has $C but shows the copyright message on all four pages.

You are using "$C 2011 John Kilpatrick (This edition may be freely copied and performed)" instead of just $C and putting "2011 John Kilpatrick(This edition may be freely copied and performed)" into File/Info/Copyright
$C is not the shortcut for ©, but a macro for showing the meta tag copyright on the 1st page of a score
Check the attached

Got it, thanks.
I've replace the score by a simpler one Copyright test

See also #19780: Add multi-line text area for copyright in New Score Wizard and File -> Score Properties.

Once the proper use of $C ascertained, can we consider this issue solved / fixed / closed rather than simply "by design"?