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Hey guys, on the free (beer/speech) information range, let's not forget:
Mutopia.

I've been waiting for something like this for a long time, ever since I tried to arrange a Mozart sonata in middle school and found I'd have to pay through the nose for the sheet music. The great works of classical music -- just like the great novels and paintings -- are part of the world's heritage, and since their original creators are long dead, there's no reason why they shouldn't be electronically available.

But this project is important for more than just personal access to music -- it might also be very useful in academic research. I'm a medieval history major, and my professors have been raving about the availability of digitized versions of medieval texts -- you can search for a word or build a concordance in no time flat, and that's brought a number of new discoveries to light that before would just have been lost amid the thousands of parchment manuscripts.

What I wonder is whether this same effect might be seen by university music departments if something like Mutopia becomes very successful. If the entire works of J.S. Bach are available in a single library in a standard format, you could probably teach a computer to search for chord patterns, etc., and develop new ways of analyzing the score that require far less effort than just reading it through (especially for someone as prolific as Bach). If your library is big enough, you could even compare the styles of various composers and identify connections and links that before would have been entirely missed.

Of course, that would require some serious work, which means serious funding. The Mutopia "how to contribute" page talks only about music, not about cash; would there be a way to turn the project into a larger effort? This is something that universities, private charitable foundations, corporations looking for feel-good gifts, or anyone who supports the local symphony might be happy to sponsor. (And who knows? Maybe NEA would be happy to join in -- it would certainly be less controversial than Mapplethorpe photos.)

While Project Gutenberg may be too general to recieve this kind of support, a specific and research-focused project might go further than we expect.

The license they distribute their music under (MutopiaBSD) sounds quite fair, and it sounds like a good deal of it is public domain anyway. I hope this succeeds. It'd be a great example of a free collection of human culture and creativity. Perhaps Project Gutenberg will eventually head down the same path that Mutopia is. PG's massive text prepended to every work and the very primitive formatting of the text makes it difficult to live with at times. (Don't get me wrong; it's still a great resource!)