White-Smith Music Publishing Company v. Apollo Company

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White-Smith Music Publishing Company v. Apollo Company

Argued January 16 – 17, 1908
Decided February 24, 1908

Full case name:	White-Smith Music Publishing Company, Appt., v. Apollo Company

Citations:	209 U.S. 1; 28 S. Ct. 319; 52 L. Ed. 655; 1908 U.S. LEXIS 1766

Holding

Music rolls for pianos do not require royalty payments because sheet music copyrights do not cover mechanical parts.

Court membership

Chief Justice: Melville Fuller
Associate Justices: John Marshall Harlan, David Josiah Brewer, Edward Douglass White, Rufus Wheeler Peckham, Joseph McKenna, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William R. Day, William Henry Moody

Case opinions

Majority by: Day
Joined by: unanimous
Concurrence by: Holmes

Superseded by

White-Smith Music Publishing Company v. Apollo Company, 209 U.S. 1 (1908), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States which ruled that manufacturers of music rolls for player pianos did not have to pay royalties to the composers. The ruling was based on a holding that the piano rolls were not copies of the plaintiffs' copyrighted sheet music, but were instead parts of the machine that reproduced the music.

This case was subsequently eclipsed by Congress's intervention in the form of an amendment to the Copyright Act of 1909, introducing a compulsory license for the manufacture and distribution of such "mechanical" embodiments of musical works.

1 Issue and relevance
2 See also
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Issue and relevance

The main issue was whether or not something had to be directly perceptible for it to be a "copy." Naturally, hardly anyone could perceive music by looking at a roll of paper with holes in it. The 1976 Copyright Act later clarified the issue, defining a "copy" as a "material object . . . in which a work is fixed . . . and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device." This case remains relevant because the 1976 Copyright Act makes an "otherwise inexplicable distinction between 'copies' and 'phonorecords.'"^[1]