ABSTRACT
This may seem to be taking us away from copyright but detail is important here. The fact is that since those French composers met at that Parisian cafe 150 years ago, there has been a phenomenal growth in the amount of time most people in the Western world spend listening to music, a phenomenal growth in the proportion of our lives which has musical accompaniment.4 The questions raised 150 years ago remain the same. What kind of control should composers have over the use of their music by other entrepreneurs? What kind of economic return should they expect from such use? But the problems of exercising such control and the amount of money potentially at stake have grown phenomenally too. The Parisian composers recognised the tunes being played in the cafe because in those days musical worlds were relatively locally defined: the audience for whom popular composers wrote was the same sort of audience for whom the cafe orchestra played; the musical tools and resources the composers used were used by the orchestra too. There was a shared musical culture that made it relatively easy to trace a work from composition to use.
