Royalty free music

[Guest raze0811]

Somebody help me please with the concept of royalty free music?

Does anybody truly own it? If I got my hands on some of it, could I use it commercially without any red tape, licenses, etc? For example, I'm pretty certain that Mozart's "Overture to Marriage" is royalty free. If I was authoring, say, a DVD that I was planning to sell, and I got ahold of this song, could I use it on the DVD?

[Benji]

I think most royalties end after 50 or 100 years, not sure if that's right or not.

[Scott McFly]

As far as I'm aware, the music itself may be royalty free, but whoever performed it would own that particular performance of the music, if you see what I mean.