The second Cease and Desist letter from Universal Edition, put a stop to one of the best efforts I’ve seen to put expired copyrighted scores into the hands of those that don’t have the means to acquire them otherwise. On Saturday October 13, 2007, another “library” was forced to close their doors to the public.
I don’t blame Feldmahler, the project leader for the group, for his decision though. He doesn’t have the time or the resources to do what Universal Edition is demanding of him. I’m not one to go against international copyright law, or ours for that matter, but this whole thing just reeks of the “big guy” squashing the “little man” again. Just when we had a little light of hope…where is the good news? The world has lost access a legitimate treasure trove of music information with the closing of this site. The people of imslp.org did nothing wrong and WERE very concerned about protecting copyright(s).
I sincerely hope that one of the larger, more powerful, and financially able music websites will pick up this project and continue it. We at mustech.net would be happy to support the continuation of IMSLP, within our means, and are sending a letter out to the folks at IMSLP to that intent.
You can read about the differences in international time frames of copyright and the rest of the mumbo-jumbo here along with a very heartfelt letter from IMSLP.org.
Want to know what IMSLP was all about, check out our article here:
https://www.mustech.net/2007/08/free-music-score-library-international-music-score-library/
Thoughts?
Thanks to Joe Severyn for bringing this issue to our attention…
[tags]copyright, copyright law, imslp.org, international music score [/tags]
This really irritates me. IMSLP was the best public domain sheet site that I knew about. It had about 14,000 scores when it was taken down. A great deal of the music were pieces that were extremely hard to find. As a teacher, player, composer, and student, IMSLP was a tremendous resource because I don’t have the money to go out and buy all the music in the world, that is if an actual edition of the piece had been printed in the last hundred years. It’s disheartening that ‘the man’ went and destroyed such a great resource just because he was afraid of losing a few bucks…
Losing a few bucks? He was initially charged 3,000 euros for each infringing piece, which totaled about 250,000 euros (around $200,000). That request *was* eventually retracted, but he was still threatened with legal action by one of the biggest music publication industries in the world, and forced to add IP filtering software to all his servers (is this expensive? i’m not sure).
[…] Mustech.net had posted a number of articles about IMSLP in the past: On 11/06/2007- Copywronged- International Music Score Library Project The Latest Victim Of The International Copyri… […]