IMSLP Taken Down

Sinfonia

http://journalofmusic.com/blog/2011/04/21/imslp-website-taken-down/

The website of the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP), which archives over 90,000 musical scores, has been taken down due to a legal challenge from the Music Publishers Association of the UK (MPA). According to IMSLP, the entire domain was taken down by the website’s hosting provider, GoDaddy, after the MPA sent GoDaddy a cease and desist notice, claming that the website was infringing copyright laws.

The IMSLP website, which was created by Edward W. Guo in 2006 while a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, Boston, was previously taken down in 2007 after a legal attack from Universal Edition, Vienna. The website, which relies on volunteers to upload scores and audio files, went back online in 2008 and now operates a strict copyright checking process, by which submissions are checked by three staff members for any possible copyright infringements.

The IMSLP says that the MPA’s current claims are ‘bogus’, stating that the musical work referenced in the cease and desist letter – Sergei Rachmaninov’s The Bells, first published in 1920 – is out of copyright in the USA and Canada.

nlgbbbblth

The heat is on.

A number of music blogs sharing deleted and out of print LPs have been affected in recent weeks. Links deleted by the likes of Megaupload and Rapidshare, DMCA notices served to their host Blogger etc.

The Mad Hatter

Seems to be back up now. Just read as a test the Seikilos Epitaph - clicked it at random and found what's thought to be the oldest complete piece of written music ever discovered. It's short and quite pretty - check it out under composer -> ancient Greek.

Anyways, I think that the case of IMSLP is an interesting one. It's a little different from Project Gutenberg and the like because music publishers, unlike book publishers, make the bulk of their money from the sale of out-of-copyright music, so easy availability of free copies of the music they sell could really do damage to them, and hinder their ability to publish newer scores at all.

On the other hand, (and I say this having played from non-physical sheet music in public,) paper copies of the music will still remain essential for most musicians, given the need to annotate quickly and clearly.

Hopefully the availability of always adequate-, occasionally good-quality copies of the music for free will lead to better editions of the classical stuff being put out, with good editing, thoughtful page layouts and fingering that makes sense, and to a reduction in the sort of production-line editions you sometimes see.

anamaria

The Mad Hatter wrote: »

On the other hand, (and I say this having played from non-physical sheet music in public,) paper copies of the music will still remain essential for most musicians, given the need to annotate quickly and clearly.
.

When you say non-physical do you mean reading from a screen? That sounds pretty hellish to me

The Mad Hatter

anamaria wrote: »

When you say non-physical do you mean reading from a screen? That sounds pretty hellish to me

Reading from my iPad. It's not too bad, but I really do miss the ability to annotate quickly and clearly.