I want someone to write the music from Spy Hunter on old time paper and pass it off as some famous composer's work.
Ideally, they first sell the manuscript to the living Koch brother.
Gaddis' The Recognitions is pretty good on this. Orson Welles' F is for Fake I also like quite a bit.
Is there much money to be made in forging a Mozart? Comparing that with the obvious cashing in opportuniity from forging a Rembrandt.
Rip-off artists all. Take it from one who knows.
Is there much money to be made in forging a Mozart? Comparing that with the obvious cashing in opportuniity from forging a Rembrandt.
It's a good point. The point about finding/faking a Rembrandt is that you now own a Rembrandt. But the point about finding/faking a Mozart manuscript is mainly that you can publish it and people can perform it and record it. There aren't galleries full of Mozart holograph scores. And you won't own the copyright to it - you'll only own copyright to whatever edition you publish, but someone else is at liberty to publish another edition. It'd be more like forging a new Jane Austen novel - if it's real then by definition it's public-domain.
3 seconding the Welles, it's great
6 you Wu-Tang Clan it, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin style.
My favorite forgery method is to not just forge the painting but also a purported contemporaneous letter describing the forgery to slip into the archives for some unwitting art appraiser to find.
9: Probably best not to confess these things even with a pseud.
Has Thomas James Wise (subject of a biography out this year) come up here? Such perfidy, it's great.
This was pretty wild too https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/01/books/booksupdate/rare-books-pushkin-disappearance.html
The asshole who runs the used bookstore by campus was stealing rare books from the public library, so I won't go there.
To the OP, is there any actual evidence that this Mozart piece is a forgery, or is it just the suspicious timing?
What's wrong with the timing?
LLMs are not all that great at producing music, but it occurs to me that a mini Mozart variation might be an exception.
The Gospel of Jesus's Wife thing was another interesting recent forgery.
I did not see the movie of that book or the fancier movie I was thinking of when I wrote 20.
Vermeer or Van Meegeren?
https://www.purposegames.com/game/vermeer-or-vermeegeren-quiz
My favorite forgery method is to not just forge the painting but also a purported contemporaneous letter describing the forgery to slip into the archives for some unwitting art appraiser to find.
The Baron of Arizona is a fun movie if you're into forgeries of records to insert into archives.
And you won't own the copyright to it - you'll only own copyright to whatever edition you publish, but someone else is at liberty to publish another edition. It'd be more like forging a new Jane Austen novel - if it's real then by definition it's public-domain.
I'm pretty sure, under current copyright law, unpublished manuscripts remain under copyright, and it doesn't expire within N years of the death of the creator, unlike published works. However, there's a 2039 expiry for any copyright on unpublished works from before 1989. So, you could, potentially have copyright in it but only if you had some legitimate claim, like you were an heir of Jane Austen.
Looks like I messed up the italics. The second paragraph is me. I used to sit on the access and reuse committee of the naieldoB, so I'm _quite_ sure as we had to address it fairly regularly.
The US also has different terms for published vs unpublished. I used to spend a lot of time looking at this chart* when putting things online. But in the US, I think anything Jane Austen wrote would have cleared copyright by now unless a treaty obligation prevents that from happening. Or there could be some renewal provision.
Berkeley, which owns copyright to the Mark Twain papers, published some things in order to get the copyright into a different category that would extend a few more decades. IIRC, the unpublished copyright would have expired on some things Twain never lived to publish, but after Berkeley published them, the published copyright term took over.
*An earlier version of it, looks like it's been updated with even more details on "special cases".