You might know that the popular music download site www.imslp.org was shut down last October, the reason being that imslp.org hosted sheet music for download that, while in the public domain in Canada and the United States (copyright expires for them and us 50 years after death of the author), was not in the public domain in Austria, Spain, or Norway (70 years after composer's death, 80, 85, respectively). Universal Edition, an enormous sheetmusic company centered in Austria, threatened to sue imslp.org for copyright infringment on the grounds that Europeans could, in theory, download sheet music not in public domain in their homeland, despite the fact that imslp.org was perfectly within Canadian national law.
There is no legal reason for a European company to assert Austrian law over that of Canadian and U.S. law. There was no real debate on this matter, but the creator of imslp.org is a college student and he couldn't afford to face a legal battle. So in October, the site was taken down.
Anyone who is in college and plays a musical instrument knows exactly how hard it is to procure music. A good edition (say, some Schubert piano sonatas) will absolutely rape you in terms of price. Good editions frequently run upwards of thirty dollars, and a collection of Beethoven's sonatas can be as much as $200 if you don't want them edited and simplified. Regardless, I would happily spend money on such edition if I had such money to spend. You get what you pay for, and a $200 collection of Beethoven will last longer than you will live. But this is obviously not the case and hence Imslp.org, though frequently the editions it distributed were ancient (early 1900s, mostly) and occaisionally badly edited, at least they were free, and would last at least a few years on standard printing paper until one can save and buy high-quality editions (Henle Urtext, Wiener Urtext, etc.)
Happily for us and for public domain, Imslp.org is set to return to the e-world on 1 July 2008! It has given Universal Edition the finger and once again the largest digital music library in the world will be back online. (I'm not kidding - before closure Imslp.org had over 25,000 scores by more than 1,000 different composers)
Hooray for public domain music and hooray for Imslp.org!
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6 comments:
Interesting, very interesting, the issues of copyright and cyberspace.
I liken it to putting something I have purchased on loan in the public library for anyone to check out. Do I feel guilty for downloading British TV? not at all. I'm not selling it, mind you- that would be different. But enjoying it meself, no problem.
Which technically is illegal - if you want to enjoy it 'yourself', you should fork over the cash and buy either purcahse BBC cable TV or purchase season DVDs.
Not that copyright infringement causes me to lose sleep, understand. I lose less sleep over copyright than I do over underage drinking.
So how do public libraries justify their DVD collections?
They have paid for product directly and we have done so indirectly insofar as public libararies are funded with our tax dollars, and we as a public lend the products to one another.
Copyright is not violated when you lend someone a product - to assert such is absurd. The violation occurs when someone uploads a product still remaining in copyright and enables the public to download it (for free or otherwise) without the publisher's permission or otherwise distributes it, for example scanning the last Harry Potter book and making it available for public download.
I really do not see how it is any different. How is it different to buy a copyrighted book and put it on loan in the library, vs. put it on loan in cyberspace?
Because when you upload an in-copyright product on the Internet, it is not 'for loan' at all. Uploading say, Return of the King is not at all the same as checking the same movie from the library for the following reason: you do not own the library product and you do in fact own the downloaded product.
If all people were doing was in fact the equivalent of "checking out" a book or movie from the library, you would be right and there would be no difference whatsoever. But this is certainly not the case. There is a very clear difference between buying Beethoven's Symphonies from Deutch Gramaphone and downloading the same work (still 'protected' by copyright) from the Internet.
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