The International Music Score Library Project is to be re-established on July 1st, 2008 at 12:00 AM EST according to a front page message on their temporary WIKI page. If you don’t know what the IMSLP project is or was I can tell you that you were missing out on something amazing…
The IMSLP housed over 15,000 copies of public domain scores that were available completely free as downloadable documents. The service was literally priceless, especially to people, groups, and organisations that did not have the financial resources to buy reprints or compilations of these public domain documents.
Approaching a year ago, on October 13th of 2007, IMSLP was forced to shutdown their noble project because of pressures from countries that were still making money off of these documents (As you may not know, copyright lengths vary from country to country). Because IMSLP was being operated by a group of individuals without tremendous resources they, no doubt wisely, decided to take the IMSLP offline until they could muster background information, new ideas, and support for the project.
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 Copyright Police.
On 08/23/2007- We gave a brief reviews of the project entitled: Free Music Score Library, International Music Score Libary Project
On 05/13/2007- My students listed the IMSLP as one of the“great music websites” available on the internet.
On November 06, of 2007 we also stated our support publicly in a letter/post to the folks at IMSLP:
Hello Feldmahler and imslp.org,I’ve been an active user and advocate of imslp.org for a number of months and am very unhappy to hear about the issues you are having keeping your site active.
I wanted to let you know that I and the people at mustech.net would like to extend any help that we can to you or those that you would deem as responsible as taking over the site from you all.
Please let us know what we can do to help. You can contact us via the contact page of our site and I will get back to you all as promptly as I can.
Best wishes for CONTINUED success and thank you for your efforts for all of us!
Dr. Joseph Pisano
If you would like to know more about the IMSLP and/or how you can help with their project, you can find the latest information here: http://imslp.wikidot.com/
Their original discussion about closing the site and links to the cease and desist letter are still able to found here (link active as of this posting): http://imslp.wikidot.com/
I am greatly anticipating the return of this WONDERFUL, FREE, and USEFUL resource and fully intend to support them in their continued operation of the site.
[…] you’ve been following my articles about the International Music Score Libary Project (IMSLP.org), you’ll be happy to know that I’ve been recently been made aware of another similiar […]