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Someone should point these schools to sites like mutopia, imslp, and for choirs, the choir public domain library.

You also have to be careful about what sheet music you are using. There are projects that distribute properly free sheet music:
http://www.mutopiaproject.org/
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Sheet_ Music_Project
http://www.cpdl.org/
http://www.imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://icking-music-archive.org/

• several public domain music sites share this interpretation, presumably after doing their legal homework. See the Mutopia Project's page about legal issues, and a similar page at CPDL. Since it is in these sites' interest to distribute, the fact that they share this interpretation does not bode well for a more liberal reading.
• As a musician, every modern score I have come across (including modern scores of early music, of which I perform a lot) will have a Copyright (C) the year it was published. So the publishers are at least attempting to assert this right. Some editions (like the New Novello Choral Edition of the Messiah) also include notes specifically forbidding even public performance of the music from the edition without payment. I always find this extremely offensive.
• There are some unarguably creative things that go into editing music -- for example, deciding what the real note is when the original manuscripts only have a smudge, reconciling differences between different manuscripts, etc -- and there will often be significant scholarship that goes into resolving these issues. Almost every edition I have encountered (even of music as recent as the 20th century) includes scholarly work like that, which would probably make a judge sympathetic to the idea that the printing is copyrightable.

Well, I'm not sure about sheet music for instruments, but here's a public domain site for vocal music.

http://www.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Try the Choral Public Domain Library, which has 8301 scores that a free to use (and counting). Of course, the fact that it's PD music means that there's nothing prior to 1923... But that works well enough for me, Purcell et al died many, many years ago :)

Cheers,

Michael

Maybe not specifically what you're looking for, but the Choral Public Domain Library: http://www.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page is a good source for free classical choral music online.

Yes, form can be a good indicator of overall quality. One thing I do is look up choral music made publicly available on the Choral Public Domain Library. There might be two or more editions of the same piece, and I'll choose the one that looks better, just because someone who cares about the look of their score is probably more likely to care that they've got all the notes right (and giving a bad score to a choir wastes a lot of time). It's not always the case, but when you have nothing else to base your decision on, the look can give an indication of how much care has been put into its production.

Now if only Apple would use better internal optical drives...

No, this is no more theft than is illegal copying. The whole conveyor belt of signing promising bands into hideously restrictive contracts with big labels is very bad, but it is not "theft".

The demise of the RIAA, as referred to in the parent article, is coming about because there is no longer any scarcity value in being able to copy and distribute recorded music. Lots of other things are happening: the public domain is now an effective reality. Public registers are now publicy available. As the printing press made scholarship available to the many, so we are now seeing the old oligopolies falling.

This is A Good Thing

You can re-enter the music in Lilypond's format and then use Lilypond to convert the score to a MIDI file for playback.
And if he does that (and the original edition he's working from is public domain), he might want to submit it to Mutopia. And in fact, before he does that, he might want to check whether the piece he's learning is already on Mutopia. However, for choral music, CPDL seems to be the place that has the most music; unfortunately, they use a proprietary format (Finale).

• http://www.mutopiaproject.org/
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Sound (Check bottom)
• Internet Archive: Open Source Audio
• Free Classical Music Archive recordings performed by the MIT choir and other amateurs (quite high quality)
• The Choral Public Domain Library describes itself as 'A Free Sheet Music Archive'
• Mutopia: a collection of public domain sheet music
• Project Gutenberg music section
• MusicBrainz: a database of structured metadata about audio releases

The best places to get sheet music for free are The Choral Public Domain Library, the Mutopia Project, Gutenberg Music, the Sheet Music Archive, and the Werner Icking Music Archive. And while we're at it, the best way to engrave (typeset) music is with Lilypond.

well, as a font designer, I have very high standards for music fonts :), except for feta the only thing I think looks good the most Finale "Engraver" style font. (IIRC). For example, most fonts get the half-notehead wrong; that should be diamond shaped, not elliptical.

I just went to Coda's website to see if I could see some examples of Finale output in PDF or whatever, and all I could find was a bunch of things [codamusic.com] that call for "the SmartMusic Viewer plug-in", which obviously I can't use. I guess it's the same idea as Sibelius's Scorch plugin, which I can't use either. Scorch uses the same file format as Sibelius proper, I believe; any idea whether these Finale SmartMusic files are the same format as the ETF files that Lilypond can import?

Don't know about the smartmusic files (send me one, and I'll have a look), but I guess it's not ETF. For PDF, head over to CPDL or www.lightandmatter.org. Most freely available finale stuff hasn't been layouted by professional engravers, which is why they usually look sucky.

is the Choral Public Domain Library. This has been going on for years now (I was one of the early contributors), and has an impressive collection.