Provider of Free Public Domain Music Shuts Down

Mark Rogers writes "The International Music Score Library Project has provided access to copies of many musical scores that are in the public domain. It has just been shut down due to a cease-and-desist letter sent to the site operator by a European Union music publisher (Universal Edition). A majority of the scores recently available at IMSLP were in the public domain worldwide. Other scores were not in the public domain in the United States or the EU (where copyright extends for 70 years after the composer's death), but were legal in Canada (where the site is hosted) and many other countries. The site's maintainers clearly labeled the copyright status of such scores and warned users to follow their respective country's copyright law. Apparently this wasn't enough for Universal Edition, who found it necessary to protect the interests of their (long-dead) composers and shut down a site that has proved useful to many students, professors, and other musicians worldwide."

Seems like he caved to an empty threat

[etymxris]

Based on the summary, I thought his ISP had shut him down. Rather, it seems he just caved. Since Canada is not part of the EU, what weight could such a C&D have?

No good deed goes unpunished

[Geof]

Allow me to quote someone named Carolus [imslpforums.org] on the IMSLP site's forums:

1. Canada's judicial system is generally very sympathetic to rulings issued by EU magistrates. Ironically, the USA is considerably more resistant (at least in places) to such meddling by judicial ideologues and corporatist cronies who like to impose their rules on people halfway around the world. Other countries with life-plus-50 terms, like South Korea, are not at all likely to abide by EU pontifications. IMSLP has a strong case, but it was by no means guaranteed that Canadian courts would be sympathetic.
2. The UE threat was probably just the leading edge for a series of legal threats from a consortium of large European publishers. IMSLP has been under discussion as a major threat in the newsletter of a EU publishers' asscoiation - which has been reported in the American Music Publishers Assocation newsletter. (Curiously, most US publishers are either unaware of IMSLP or don't care.)
3. IMSLP has grown so huge that its administration and management are really beyond the capabilities of a single person plus several trusty and reliable helpers. The time has really come for IMSLP to be re-constituted in a more institutional form, like Gutenberg or Wikipedia, or perhaps taken over by a consortium of music libraries.
4. Life-plus-70 is no guarantee. As you can see from the list, there are no less than four composers listed in the C & D letter who have been dead for over 70 years. This could have been sheer stupidity and arrogance on UE's part, or these composers could still be protected in Austria by some sort of special provision in that country's copyright law.

This was just one person providing a public service... uh, sorry, competing unfairly with the copyright cartel.

Re:Why take the site down?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi! I am the spokesperson for the IMSLP owner, and I would like to direct your attention to the following post made, for a (rather) complete list of reasons why IMSLP is down:

http://imslpforums.org/viewtopic.php?p=3082#3082 [imslpforums.org]

Re:Why take the site down?

[maiki]

If you take a gander at the IMSLP website, the former project leader listed a couple reasons why (well, kind of the same reason, reiterated several times):

I became painfully aware of the fact that I, a normal college student, has[sic] neither the energy nor the money necessary to deal with this issue in any other way than to agree with the cease and desist, and take down the entire site.

I also understand very well that the cease and desist letter does not call for a take down of the entire site, but, as I said above, I very unfortunately simply do not have the energy or money necessary to implement the terms in the cease and desist in any other way. Prior to this cease and desist I was already overloaded with server maintenance and the implementation of new features

Another major reason behind me taking the server down is the fact...that I can no longer support IMSLP adequately

so basically, he doesn't have energy or money to either change what was demanded of him, or to otherwise maintain the site anymore. However, he did preface his entire spiel with this, in big bold letters:

UPDATE: Due to demand, I strongly encourage any organization willing to support a continuation of IMSLP to contact me at [e-mail]

Mutopia Project - All legal sheet music in USA+EU

[Anonymous Coward]

Try the Mutopia Project [mutopiaproject.org] - all their sheet music is out of copyright in both the USA and the EU.

Not that this lessens the tragedy of a site having to shut down due to baseless threats which would cost too much to defend against.

Re: Composers get their share

[Telephone Sanitizer]

> That person got paid their songwriting fee, and that's that (I think).

No, that person gets paid quite a bit for performance rights and music-publishing.

'Probably much more per track than Ms. Spears gets for doing the vocals since in addition to royalties on the album and online music sales the composer also gets paid for radio-play where Ms. Spears does not.

What makes Ms. Spears' arrangement more advantageous than the composers' are the payments from other sources such as advances against sales, concerts, merchandise, appearances and publicity, commercial advertisements -- and of course the free stuff that she gets just for showing up at awards ceremonies, bars and parties.

Not again ...

[guerby]

This is unfortunately not a first, the canadian site "Classiques des Sciences Sociale" collecting social science texts was threatened in 2003 by a french editor over works public domain for 50 but not in 70: the story is here (in french) [classiques.uqac.ca]. After a big fuss, the editor went away, but copyright owners never learn...

Expert Opinion

[Hemogoblin]

Michael Geist, the lawyer, weighs in on the issue [michaelgeist.ca]

In this particular case, UE demanded that the site use IP addresses to filter out non-Canadian users, arguing that failing to do so infringes both European and Canadian copyright law. It is hard to see how this is true given that the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that sites such as IMSLP are entitled to presume that they are being used in a lawful manner and therefore would not rise to the level of authorizing infringement. The site was operating lawfully in Canada and there is no positive obligation in the law to block out non-Canadians.

As for a European infringement, if UE is correct, then the public domain becomes an offline concept, since posting works online would immediately result in the longest single copyright term applying on a global basis. That can't possibly be right. Canada has chosen a copyright term that complies with its international obligations and attempts to import longer terms - as is the case here - should not only be rejected but treated as copyright misuse.

Re:Not again....

[DustyShadow]

Actually it does happen all the time. It's called personal jurisdiction. Look it up. If the court finds that the site had the "minimum contacts" in the US, then they'd have jurisdiction over them. Do you not think that the U.S. should be able to target people who illegally import goods to the U.S.? Why should we prejudice our own citizens who are harmed by those outside the U.S. if those that did the harm were purposely targeting Americans? How do you think the victims of bombings that took place outside the U.S. were able to sue Osama bin Laden in a U.S. court? (yes, kind of a pointless suit on other grounds) Every country does have laws like this. Why do you think the U.S. was able to have that British hacker who hacked in the DOD systems a couple years back?

In fact, it's happening a lot write now in Britain where people who don't like books that are written about them are suing the author in court in Britain for defamation, even though the book was never sold and never intended to be sold in Britain. The people bringing the suit simply go to Amazon and buy a few copies. Read about it here. [nytimes.com]

The reason I said "it depends on how the site works" is because the Supreme Court has already looked at the issue of personal jurisdiction and websites in the Pavlovich case, the guy who made the LiVid website that dealt with DeCSS and DVDs with Linux. There was no jurisdiction in that case but the court said if the website was more interactive and targeted people in California then there would have been. So, if this site had targeted Americans, then yes, they could have had PJ in the U.S.

With all that said, i think it's pretty shitty to do that to this guy.

U.S. & E.U. should go back to old Copyright sy

[Jane Q. Public]

The whole problem here was and has continued to be unwarranted extensions to the concept of copyright, brought about by greedy corporations.

The original Copyrights were like patents: 17 years. That was to give incentive to the creators of original works, who could sell them for a limited time, before the work became public domain. But copyrights were put there to encourage creators to create works for the public good, because it eventually did pass to the public. The problem was, if the public just took original works, then there was no incentive for the creative types to create. Thus Copyright law.

And the concepts of Fair Use allowed the public and schools to use even copyrighted materials in certain circumstances, again for the public good.

It was never intended, originally, that all rights to works should be held, essentially forever, by private parties. That is a complete bastardization of the whole concept.

It was designed to be only temporary, just like patents. Then greedy people got it extended to the life of the creator. And then more. And now, life plus 70 years! Which in many cases is more than the lifetime of a member of the general public. And the DMCA has been used to even stifle university research if that research would endanger someone's copyright! What a crock!

How can that possibly be in the public interest???

If we went back to the old system, 17 years or even compromise and say 30 or 35... a whole lot of these "problems" surrounding copyrights would just GO AWAY!!!