On June 29 the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP), a Canadian-based online library of digitized sheet music came back online. Apparently CIPPIC, the Stanford Fair Use Project and others came to the rescue.
The revival of this project represents one important battle won. As I posted and, more interestingly, Howard Knopf posted, last year, the site was shut down following threats from Universal Edition AG. Universal's complaint? The site, legal under Canadian copyright law, was infringing the copyright laws of other countries. This flew in the face of Canadian copyright sovereignty; if everyone in the world has to follow the highest level of copyright held by any country in the world we'd all be operating, as Knopf noted, under Mexican copyright law, which lasts for life + 100 years.
If life + 100 seems long now, life + 50 seemed long in 1910 when the term was first considered among British possessions. That year at an Imperial Copyright Conference, one British official confessed, when he saw that the proposed term of life + 50 years “it rather shocked him.” He doubted that such a long term would be accepted by the House of Commons. Representatives from Canada and India found the proposed term long, but were prepared to go along with it. Only the New Zealand delegate, Hall Caine, refused to go along, blocking a unanimous recommendation on the point, which nevertheless was eventually incorporated into law throughout the British dominions.
The IMSLP project demonstrates what those decisions were really about. The willingness of Britain, Canada and India to go along with shockingly longer and longer terms, and the tendency of many projects to cave under threat of legal action, have made projects like the IMSLP rare. However for now, with the principle of copyright sovereignty defended, Canada is making possible a wonderful resource for music students and lovers around the world.
Showing posts with label Sheet music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sheet music. Show all posts
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Monday, October 22, 2007
IMSLP: The End of Canadian Copyright?
A Canadian musical Project Gutenberg was taken down on Friday in the most disturbing of stories. The International Music Score Library Project allowed users to post copyright-expired sheet music online. The project was run by a student for the most honorable of reasons:
The site, however, is in Canada, run by a Canadian. By accounts (Michael Geist and Howard Knopf again), the site therefore is therefore subject to Canadian law - not European or American or Mexican law.
If the Universal Edition AG logic takes hold, it means that Canadian copyright laws don't matter on the Internet. It means that Canadians would be obliged to comply with whatever the highest, most absurd level of copyright protection in the world happens to be, no matter what Canadian law might say about it. Either that, or Canadians could wall-up Canadian web sites so that other high-protectionist countries can't access them.
The student who ran IMSLP can't fight Universal Edition AG. His call for others to take up the torch and keep IMSLP online is moving and inspiring and hopefully will lead to a bigger fight.
As a Canadian, I have a certain satisfaction in knowing that Canada, so far, has stuck with life + 50. And, as a former music student, I also know how very expensive sheet music is (including online; I've written elsewhere about crappy online sheet music stores). Even that which is "in the public domain" is accessible only to the very privileged and quite unaffordable to most music students. I don't know how many music books I've left at the store; the prices are astronomical. Even home-written guitar-tab sites are also being shut down by music publishers.
If Universal cared about music, it would be offering to sponsor this site with ads, not shutting it down, along with Canadian copyright sovereignty.
"As a musician and music lover, I find unacceptable the fact that such a wonderful thing as music can be so inaccessible in certain regions of the world. I believe that access to our culture and the Arts is a fundamental right of every human being, and not simply a privilege. Therefore, I had created IMSLP with the intention that music, which is in the public domain, should be freely accessible to every single person."By accounts (Michael Geist and Howard Knopf give very good ones), the site fully complied with Canadian copyright law, where the copyright term is life + 50 years, because it only published the music of composers dead longer than that. The problem? Universal Edition AG argued that the site was infringing copyright in other countries, where copyright is life + 70 or even life + 100 (Mexico) years.
The site, however, is in Canada, run by a Canadian. By accounts (Michael Geist and Howard Knopf again), the site therefore is therefore subject to Canadian law - not European or American or Mexican law.
If the Universal Edition AG logic takes hold, it means that Canadian copyright laws don't matter on the Internet. It means that Canadians would be obliged to comply with whatever the highest, most absurd level of copyright protection in the world happens to be, no matter what Canadian law might say about it. Either that, or Canadians could wall-up Canadian web sites so that other high-protectionist countries can't access them.
The student who ran IMSLP can't fight Universal Edition AG. His call for others to take up the torch and keep IMSLP online is moving and inspiring and hopefully will lead to a bigger fight.
As a Canadian, I have a certain satisfaction in knowing that Canada, so far, has stuck with life + 50. And, as a former music student, I also know how very expensive sheet music is (including online; I've written elsewhere about crappy online sheet music stores). Even that which is "in the public domain" is accessible only to the very privileged and quite unaffordable to most music students. I don't know how many music books I've left at the store; the prices are astronomical. Even home-written guitar-tab sites are also being shut down by music publishers.
If Universal cared about music, it would be offering to sponsor this site with ads, not shutting it down, along with Canadian copyright sovereignty.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Sheety Sheet Music
A few weeks ago I made a comment to a friend that I'd like to be able to download sheet music for $1/song, just like on iTunes or puretracks. He said those types of services exist, although it's not $1/song; it's more like $5/song.
So I tried the two sites he pointed me at:
musicnotes.com
sheetmusicdirect.com
At musicnotes.com you can download either individual songs (about $5 each) or a whole album/book (about $30 each).
At sheetmusicdirect you can download only individual songs (about $4 each.
Sheetmusic direct seems to have the added capability of transposing the music into your key before you download it, but their software crashed my browser and I wasn't able to use their site to buy music in the end.
The music I purchased from musicnotes.com (Coldplay's Parachutes album)comes with a statement at the bottom of every page of music: "Authorized for use by Sara Bannerman." How ridiculous. I think this is a scare-tactic, because I didn't see anything in the way of a license saying that only I, the purchaser, was allowed to play the music.
Anyway, apparently there is now a war starting to get rid of unauthorized sites that offer sheet music.
Publishers Exert Pressure on Rogue Sheet Music Sites
What bothers me about this is that the quality of the sheet music I downloaded - in terms of musical correctness and musical arrangement - sucks.
I know that the market for sheet music is difficult. When the main outlets for legitimate sheet music were dusty stores in malls where it was difficult to find anything you wanted and where most of the music available was 100 years old, I could understand that problem. But today technology makes a really good, competetive and profitable market for sheet music possible.
I would like to see an open market on sheet music - a web site where all comers could write a transcription of a song and upload it onto an authorized web site for sale. A percentage of the proceeds could go to the person with the rights to the song, and the rest to the transcriber. People could post comments/reviews about which is the best arrangement etc.. Then, when I went to buy a transcription of a song, I'd have several difficulty levels to choose from and several arrangements. I might find that a particular transcriber was my favourite, and look for other transcriptions by that person. And really good transcribers would be rewarded. That would be much better than the current system, which generally offers only one version (seemingly a computer-generated transcription of something someone has churned out in 3 minutes on a MIDI-keyboard) of a song - often the same version across services (on both musicnotes and sheetmusicdirect). It would create a whole new market, competition, and tons of innovative renditions of songs for people to play - at the right difficulty level, which would be good for music education too.
That is the kind of thing that copyright is supposed to be for - the encouragement and dissemination of high-quality products, not for boxing up the market so that extremely low-cost and low-quality products are the only ones available.
So I tried the two sites he pointed me at:
musicnotes.com
sheetmusicdirect.com
At musicnotes.com you can download either individual songs (about $5 each) or a whole album/book (about $30 each).
At sheetmusicdirect you can download only individual songs (about $4 each.
Sheetmusic direct seems to have the added capability of transposing the music into your key before you download it, but their software crashed my browser and I wasn't able to use their site to buy music in the end.
The music I purchased from musicnotes.com (Coldplay's Parachutes album)comes with a statement at the bottom of every page of music: "Authorized for use by Sara Bannerman." How ridiculous. I think this is a scare-tactic, because I didn't see anything in the way of a license saying that only I, the purchaser, was allowed to play the music.
Anyway, apparently there is now a war starting to get rid of unauthorized sites that offer sheet music.
Publishers Exert Pressure on Rogue Sheet Music Sites
What bothers me about this is that the quality of the sheet music I downloaded - in terms of musical correctness and musical arrangement - sucks.
I know that the market for sheet music is difficult. When the main outlets for legitimate sheet music were dusty stores in malls where it was difficult to find anything you wanted and where most of the music available was 100 years old, I could understand that problem. But today technology makes a really good, competetive and profitable market for sheet music possible.
I would like to see an open market on sheet music - a web site where all comers could write a transcription of a song and upload it onto an authorized web site for sale. A percentage of the proceeds could go to the person with the rights to the song, and the rest to the transcriber. People could post comments/reviews about which is the best arrangement etc.. Then, when I went to buy a transcription of a song, I'd have several difficulty levels to choose from and several arrangements. I might find that a particular transcriber was my favourite, and look for other transcriptions by that person. And really good transcribers would be rewarded. That would be much better than the current system, which generally offers only one version (seemingly a computer-generated transcription of something someone has churned out in 3 minutes on a MIDI-keyboard) of a song - often the same version across services (on both musicnotes and sheetmusicdirect). It would create a whole new market, competition, and tons of innovative renditions of songs for people to play - at the right difficulty level, which would be good for music education too.
That is the kind of thing that copyright is supposed to be for - the encouragement and dissemination of high-quality products, not for boxing up the market so that extremely low-cost and low-quality products are the only ones available.
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