Swan Lake Recording

[LiamM]

It is also important to consider fair use / fair dealing, which are exemptions from the exclusive use granted by copyright law. Of course, the rules vary by country. Central questions would be: Does the availability of the copied work make people less likely to buy the original? What is the purpose of the copying? In this case, it is to illustrate critical commentary on a theatrical work, in a non-commercial context, and unlikely to cause someone to not buy the original recording. In Canada and the USA, this use is probably legal, from my understanding of copyright law (IANAL). UK fair dealing may be different from Canada's in ways that apply to this case; I don't know.

[ERinVA]

Since this is a British-based forum, our best British legal advice has been that it made sense to remove the link, especially in light of the fact that the file sharing sites would not allow it to be uploaded for sharing.

Also, it would make sense to me that "fair use" could apply to an individual's right to have the file , but not to share it with a large multi-user forum like this one.

Legally, I would have to agree, but I believe the creative staff should have put this on the original cast recording. I can't imagine any royalties for this would have been prohibitively high.

I wish they had included it too.

In any case, I believe that jotunheim's original question about the music has been answered.

[Steamboy]

At some point in the past, we discussed the length of the OCR, and came to the conclusion that adding the Swan Lake music to the OCR would have made it too long to fit on a single disc in uncompressed file types. Therefore, the question became, if they added SL to the OCR, what would have gone away?

[LiamM]

They could have put it on the almost-empty second CD.

While they were at it, they could have put on music such as the shadow dance. But realistically, not very many people are interested in the fine details of the show that they would be interested in tracks like that.

[ERinVA]

The Shadow Dance as performed today is not original to the show. Billy originally did a few poses, but the huge shadows and the "shadow puppet swan" were later additions. I don't remember if the music changed significantly as a result of the additions or not, but in any case I assume that this small bit of choreography was considered to be just a brief musical transition and not a "number" when decisions were being made about what to include on the OCR. As you say, probably not many people would be interested in having small bits and pieces like that on the recording.